Most Active Stories Fri December 9, 2011 The Surprising
Ingredient In Raw Cookie Dough That Could Make You Sick Cookie
dough may be one of the joys of the holiday season, but it's
dangerous, at least for people who nibble it raw. That's the
lesson from a new study of a 2009 outbreak of E. coli bacteria,
which sickened 77 people, most of them teenage girls and
children. The outbreak was traced back to eating raw Nestlé Toll
House cookie dough. It was the first time that packaged cookie
dough had ever caused an outbreak. Now for the next surprise:
Food safety experts think the most likely culprit is flour.
Their findings appear today in the journal Clinical Infectious
Disease. "We didn't conclusively implicate the flour," Karen
Neil, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention who investigated the outbreak, tells The Salt.
But of all the ingredients, she says, flour seems most likely.
Some ingredients, including molasses, sugar, and margarine, had
been processed to kill pathogens. A