NZFSSRC
Chicken or Egg? The Salmonella Enteritidis challenge
This article has been written exclusively for Food New Zealand by the New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre.
First cases In October 2019, 38 diners at a very nice Auckland restaurant became ill: 17 were confirmed to have an infection with Salmonella, of the serotype Enteritidis (SE). Two of the confirmed cases ended up in hospital. Follow-up interviews by the health authority pointed to two desserts. One was a panna cotta, but the vanilla pods which were an ingredient in that dish were ruled out as a possible source of the bacteria. The other dessert was a semi-freddo – this is short and poshsounding Italian for a partly frozen ice cream. It seems likely that the bacteria were harboured by raw eggs in the dessert, as the same strain
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was subsequently identified at the farm supplying the restaurant. However, this is speculation as no samples of the ice cream were tested at the time. There is still an outside possibility that a food handler may have contaminated the food. Until 2019, there were typically 1000-1200 cases of salmonellosis (all serotypes) per year, and roughly one third of these were acquired overseas. Sixty-two percent of all cases were foodborne and a fifth of these attributed to poultry. Ironically, despite the SE outbreak spikes, total cases actually declined significantly between 2020 and 2022 because of the sudden death of overseas travel and eating out, and many other factors directly or indirectly connected to the pandemic.
