But Raw Cookie Dough Tastes So Good!
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the flour not the raw eggs or chocolate chips, was the likely source of a 2009 outbreak of E. coli infection from Nestle's Toll House cookie dough.
Because of that news, the CDC is asking for fail-safe formulas for packaging raw cookie dough. And while women around America wait for that to happen, the lead investigator for the CDC, Dr. Karen Neil, told the Star on Thursday, “Don't eat raw cookie dough, period.”
In 2009, seventy-seven people in thirty states got sick from exposure to the deadly E. coli bacteria from raw cookie dough. Thirty-five of them were hospitalized and ten suffered serious kidney damage. Thank God none of them died.
After hundreds of investigators studied the E. coli outbreak, they reported their findings on Friday. They were in a hurry to report before the Christmas season gets too far along. Dr. Neil said, “Cookie dough is not a ready-to-eat product. But we know that people night eat the product anyway even though they're told not to. This is an extra layer of safety.” The investigation's report told that some of the victims bought the dough just to eat it raw, even though there were ample warnings on the packages.
Females, especially teenage girls, make up a huge majority of the cookie-dough eaters in America. The victims of the outbreak ranged in age from under 5 to their late 60's. Half of them were under under nineteen and seventy-one percent of them were female.
Normally, E. coli is not associated with raw cookie dough, but is normally associated with ground beef. Moreover, the disease normally associated with raw cookie dough sickness is salmonella from raw eggs.
After the outbreak in 2009, Nestle recalled 3.6 million packages of cookie-dough the next day from the suspected plant that was believed to be the source of the E. coli outbreak. Moreover, since the outbreak, Nestle and other manufacturers have begun using heat-treated flour in cookie dough production in order to reduce the likelihood of contamination.
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