Our Egg

Safe Eggs for Everyone

Avoiding Salmonella & Ensuring Egg Safety

Everyone should enjoy Davidson's Safest Choice® Pasteurized Shell Eggs as a safe way to avoid egg-related foodborne illnesses and stop cross contamination in your kitchen. Our pasteurized eggs are especially great for these highly susceptible populations, for whom egg safety is a must:

Older adults over 50
Infants
Children under 10
Pregnant women
Diabetics
Post-operative patients
Individuals with influenza or pneumonia
Anyone with a weakened immune system

Considering that at some point throughout the year we all become ill, thus weakening our immune system, when it comes to avoiding the added food safety risk eggs can bring, everyone should simply choose safe eggs!

Davidson's Safest Choice® is the leader in pasteurized shell eggs! Using a revolutionary patented technology, National Pasteurized Eggs, Inc. produces Davidson's Safest Choice® Pasteurized Shell Eggs and distributes them across the nation. This process kills Salmonella bacteria and viruses like Avian influenza. Yet Davidson’s Safest Choice® eggs look, cook and taste just like other shell eggs.

Raw Cookie Dough and Undercooked Eggs... Now Safe to Eat!

Pasteurized shell eggs keep your kitchen safe from cross contamination and allow you to prepare and eat eggs any way you like — even undercooked eggs and raw eggs. Enjoy eggs over easy or sunny-side up, raw in sauces and Caesar salads, lightly cooked in custards and desserts. With Davidson’s Safest Choice® you can even enjoy raw cookie dough because you’ve made the Safest Choice!

Salmonella and Older Americans

If you or someone you care for is 65 or older, increased risks for foodborne illness from Salmonella bacteria and others could be at play. This makes choosing pasteurized shell eggs more critical than ever.

Here’s why:

As the body ages, the digestive system slows down. This means bacteria such as Salmonella spend more time in the system, with greater opportunity to cause illness.
With age, the immune system often weakens, making a person more susceptible to foodborne illness.
By age 65, many people are taking at least one medication for a chronic health condition. Many medications also weaken the immune system.
A decline in sense of smell and taste may make it easier for an older person to accidentally eat spoiled food. (However, not all dangerous food smells or tastes spoiled.)
Some older Americans have less-than-optimal nutrition, due to social factors (such as living alone), reduced enjoyment of food (due to taste changes), or ongoing health conditions (such as surgery or disease).
A natural decline in sense of thirst means that dehydration is more common, making the body less resilient and more susceptible to infection.

Why focus on Salmonella? Of all the bacteria that cause foodborne illness, Salmonella is number-one, triggering more cases than any other bacteria. In all, that’s about 1.4 million illnesses in the US every year—and more deaths than any other foodborne illness culprit.

Four out of five of these illnesses trace back to shell eggs. This is what makes Davidson’s pasteurized shell eggs™, which eliminate this risk of Salmonella, such a powerful tool in food safety.

The reality is that—compared with their younger family members— older Americans are 10 to 100 times more likely to contract a foodborne illness. Most deaths from Salmonella illness strike elderly Americans, according to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More About Salmonella Illness

Salmonella bacteria, most commonly a strain called Salmonella enteritidis, enter the body through contaminated food. As few as 15 bacterial cells can cause illness. Up to three days later, symptoms such as fever, diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and headache appear. Illness lasts a few days or more.

Sometimes, a physician will recommend hospitalization to treat dehydration and severe diarrhea. Recovery time depends on the exact strain of Salmonella bacteria and a patient’s overall health.

On occasion, Salmonella illness delivers a kind of one-two punch: A few weeks after initial illness, 1 in 50 sufferers develops reactive arthritis, also called Reiter’s Syndrome. Reiter’s brings on symptoms such as urinary inflammation, incontinence, conjunctivitis (irritation in the eyes), joint pain, and sometimes skin lesions. This illness may continue for months.

Simple Prevention

A few simple food-safe steps can lend extra protection to you or the vulnerable seniors in your life:

Use pasteurized shell eggs for egg meals like sunny-side up eggs, omelets, quiche, or even French toast.
Use pasteurized shell eggs for any dish that calls for raw or undercooked eggs, like eggnog, Caesar salad dressing, or even raw cookie dough—where sampling is irresistible!
Avoid other foods associated with Salmonella illness, such as raw seed sprouts (alfalfa sprouts, mung bean sprouts, etc.). Normally, cooking eliminates foodborne bacteria, but sprouts are often eaten raw.
Wash all produce and keep it refrigerated after cutting or chopping.
Cook chicken to a minimum safe temperature of 165°F. The way to be sure is to use a thermometer, inserted into the thickest part of the meat, away from bone. Frozen, pre-made chicken dishes may still require thorough cooking, warn health officials. Check package directions to be sure.
Wash hands before preparing food. Many germs travel on human hands!
Keep perishable foods cold (at 40°F), and hot foods hot. Experts say many foodborne illnesses trace back to foods that spend too much time at room temperature. This means you should store leftovers in the refrigerator promptly, and thaw frozen food in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
Use clean cutting boards and utensils when switching from raw meat to another food. This prevents transfer of bacteria from uncooked foods.

The truth is that susceptibility to foodborne illness and its potentially devastating effects goes hand-in-hand with aging. But a little know-how can go a long way in protecting health. The simple step of choosing pasteurized shell eggs to replace regular shell eggs eliminates the largest risk.

Salmonella and Diabetes

More than 23 million American have diabetes today, exposing them to a heightened risk of foodborne illness.

Diabetes is characterized by high blood sugar levels. There are two main types: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 results from destruction of cells in the pancreas. These cells normally produce insulin. (Insulin is a body hormone that helps the body use sugar. Sugar comes not only from high-sugar foods, but also from the breakdown of starches in digestion.)

In Type 2, the body is not using insulin properly, which leads to high blood sugar levels. This is by far the most common type of diabetes—in all, about 90-95% of cases. (For information about these and other types of diabetes, visit the American Diabetes Association website: www.diabetes.org.)

Diabetes and Foodborne Illness Risk
What’s the connection between blood sugar and food safety? Over time, diabetes can gradually damage body organs and systems, making it harder to resist foodborne illness. For example, food may spend more time in the gastrointestinal tract, giving bacteria such as Salmonella more opportunity to enter the body. Diabetes can weaken the immune system, too. The stronger the immune system, the more the body fights off potential foodborne illness.

With these facts in mind, the US Department of Agriculture advises anyone with diabetes to “make safe food handling a lifelong commitment to minimize the risk of foodborne illness.”

One way to do this is to focus on food categories. Certain foods offer the potential for bacteria and viruses to grow and cause foodborne illness, and these same foods are often involved in foodborne illness. We need these foods for health and nutrition, but we also need to pay special attention to handling them to ensure food safety. Here’s the list:

Meat, poultry, and fish, such as undercooked ground beef or chicken, seafood
Dairy products—especially unpasteurized milk or cheeses made from unpasteurized milk; unpasteurized shell eggs or foods prepared from unpasteurized shell eggs
Fresh produce, which has been increasingly involved in foodborne illness over recent years.

Food-Safe Tips for Anyone with Diabetes
What can you do? Here are some ideas:

Make food-safe choices. This means avoiding foods that pose the greatest danger—milk, cheese, juices, or fresh shell eggs that are not pasteurized. In each of these foods, the pasteurization process eliminates dangerous bacteria like Salmonella, Listeria, or E. coli.
Choose pasteurized shell eggs to knock out one of the highest-risk foods. (Salmonella is the top cause of bacterial foodborne illness, and eggs are the top source.)
When shopping for milk, cheese, juice, and eggs, check food labels for the word “pasteurized”.
Avoid other high-risk food such as raw seafood in sushi, refrigerated smoked fish, and undercooked burgers.
Follow the basic four food-safe practices—Clean (wash your hands and kitchen surfaces), Separate (keep cooked or ready-to-eat foods apart from raw foods), Cook (cook animal foods such as meat, poultry, and shellfish thoroughly to destroy germs), and Chill (keep cold foods cold and refrigerate leftovers right away).

For details about cooking temperatures and more food-safe tips, see Food Safety for People with Diabetes (US Department of Agriculture.)

Egg Safety Tips
Here are more egg tips from the US Department of Agriculture:

Purchase eggs in the shell from the refrigerated section of the store.
Store eggs in their original carton in the main part of your refrigerator.
For recipes that call for eggs that are raw or undercooked when the dish is served—Caesar salad dressing and homemade ice cream are two examples—use shell eggs that have been treated to destroy Salmonella by pasteurization.
When consuming raw eggs, use pasteurized eggs—the safe choice.
When you eat eggs or egg dishes in a restaurant, ask if the food is made with pasteurized eggs.

Anyone with diabetes can benefit from taking extra steps to protect personal health. “Eggstra” attention to safe food practices can make a difference.