c. Maryn McKenna

Easter Chicks: Cute, Fluffy, and Probably Bad For You

ByMaryn Mckenna
April 03, 2015
2 min read

In the United States—and for that matter in much of the world—the foodborne disease Salmonella is a major public health problem. Here, it causes an estimated 1 million cases every year. We tend to think of those cases, and most foodborne illness, as minor episodes of needing to stay close to the bathroom—but every year, 19,000 of them end up in the hospital and almost 400 people die. And even if they survive, people aren’t necessarily out of danger; after decades of dismissing foodborne illness as unimportant and self-limited, researchers are beginning to understand that it can have lifelong consequences.

So it’s important, as much as possible, to identify the sources of Salmonella infection, and to alert people to the ways in which they can protect themselves.

And that’s why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, is worried about those fluffball Easter chicks that might be appearing in households this weekend, as well as the juvenile poultry that backyard farmers and urban locavores may begin buying as the weather warms.

As I mentioned in my intro post yesterday, I also am writing for National Geographic‘s food site, The Plate, and I have a new post up there about the under-appreciated danger posed by live baby poultry. Whether you are buying them for immediate adorableness on top of an Easter basket, or eventual eggs or meat in a small-scale coop, most of us find baby chicks irresistible, in the hard-wired way that makes us melt before kittens and babies too. So we cradle them, and cuddle them, and smooch them on top of the head. But we forget that, just like babies of every other species, they are poop machines. And Salmonella travels in poop.

There are millions of baby chicks and other poultry sold every year: several millions pounds’ worth, according to the US Post Office, which ships most of them. In the past several years, they have caused significant outbreaks: 363 people in 43 states in 2014; 158 people ill, in 30 states in 2013; 195 people sick in 27 states in 2012; and 316 people sick in 43 states in the years before that.

This isn’t an argument against buying baby poultry, especially not if you’re doing it for small-scale egg or meat production. (Animal welfare organizations urge not buying baby animals just for Easter, because of the likelihood they will be dumped.)

But it is a plea on behalf of something I’m probably going to be saying a lot as we go forward: Don’t forget to wash your hands.

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