Is eating rare steak safe now that 15% cows have e.coli in their gut? CALLING ALL MICRBIOLOGISTS?

Question

I was surfing the web and looking at e.coli and found this statistic. I like rare beef and I wondered if I was putting myself at risk.

Answer 1

Well I'm not a microbiologist, but I've worked as a chef before :)
Basically any bacterial contamination occurs on the outside of the steak, so it should be destroyed by cooking even if the middle remains rare.
So any danger comes from poor kitchen hygiene such as unwashed hands and utensils (such as using tongs that have touched raw meat to turn them during cooking), and this applies to any high risk foods not just rare steak.

So basically you don't have any more chance of getting ill from a rare steak than any other food, just make sure you eat in a reputable restaurant :)

Answer 2

If the steak was butchered, transported, stored, handled, and prepared properly then there should be no E. coli in rare steak. Material from a cow's "gut" should never ever ever ever come in contact with meat for human consumption unless it has been fully processed (like sausage casings.)

Steak is essentially muscle tissue from the animal. Bacteria cannot survive inside of a muscle. It has to be placed there after it has been butchered. The bacteria can gather on the surface of the meat but that should be killed by cooking even in a rare steak.

That being said, I would only order rare steak from a fine steak house (not outback steak house!) or prepare it at home after getting the meat from a reputable butcher (not a supermarket.)

Don't confuse this with ground beef. There's absolutely no way of knowing where the bacteria is in ground beef because it's all mixed up during processing.

Answer 3

I would wager a guess that well over 15% of cows have E. coli in their gut.

Virtually every human has E. coli in their gut. And thanks to gross people, we come in contact with "foreign" E. coli daily and don't get sick, because most strains of E. coli are non-pathogenic. Pathogenic strains, such as O157:H7, STEC, EPEC etc, are the ones that cause trouble.

Furthermore, steak is safe to eat rare because the tissue you're eating should have been basically sterile. The outside isn't, because of food prep. and handling and whatnot, but the inside is. So even cooking it "rare" is enough to kill what's on the surface.

This is the same reason that eating rare ground beef is a bad idea. It's not an intact piece of meat with an inside and and outside, so there can be bacteria (introduced during the processing stage) anywhere in the meat, so if you only cook ground beef rare it's not hot enough on the inside to kill the bacteria.

Answer 4

E. Coli comes from the cow's gut and meat can be contaminated anywhere from the slaughterhouse to your plate. Since you cannot be certain of how it has been handled, ie if you are eating a contaminated piece of meat, and since the only way to kill E. Coli is to thouroughly cook the meat, you are sadly taking a risk everytime you decide to eat your steak rare.

Ironically thought, even by being a vegeterian you cannot have zero risk of being infected, since other foods can be contaminated, as demonstrated by last year's spinach-related outbreak !

Answer 5

We don't eat the gut though, it is taken out of the cow without being split open or touched anything and then put into a special blue box to be destroyed, I saw it on Kill it, Cook it, Eat it - rather good but gruesome!

Answer 6

Dint confuse risks of uncommon or medium doneness steaks with uncommon or medium doneness hamburger. truthfully, the purely surfaces that is uncovered to bacteria on a steak are the reduce aspects. the interior is "sparkling." In hamburger that is all floor up mutually, and there is not any "sparkling interior" layer of meat. wish that is wise! do not issue about what some arbitrary record of meat doneness says about you. eat it the way you want it. yet I do agree that properly executed may be slightly extra carcinogenic if cooked over timber or charcoal, and (as a medium-uncommon steak love), a waste of solid meat.

Answer 7

Steak isn't cow gut. It's muscle. So who cares if there is E. coli in their gut.

And besides, you have of E. coli in your own gut, along with approximately 400 other species of bacteria - nearly 100 trillion bacteria live in your gut - get over it. They make up about half of you daily poop.

Answer 8

hate to put a dampner on things but this is a subject i take very seriously, my niece died aged 21 from nvcjd (mad cow disease), so if i was going to eat beef at all i would advise to cook it very very well to kill every bug in there, but even then i dont think it kills mad cow, dont start worrying now though this is a very rare didease and its a lottery who gets it.

Answer 9

Uhm you said it, it's in "their gut", so unless you're eating their gut rare.

Also you shouldn't generally eat stuff rare, medium rare seems fine, but something that's bleeding can have decomposed a bit, so it's not great for you.

Answer 10

I wouldn't recommend it. Aside from bacteria (such as E. coli and leptospirosis) other parasites, such as trichinosis, tapeworm, and amoeba could be lurking in your mystery meat. It is best to well cook your meat, or avoid it altogether. Although the risk in this country is somewhat low (at least in comparisons to other countries), the consequences are pretty steep.