To avoid unpleasant surprises during your holiday meals, check that certain foods such as salmon, rillettes, cheese, raw or smoked foods, are not on the list of products recalled by health authorities. The details of Géraldine Zamansky, journalist for the Health magazine on France 5.
franceinfo: Geraldine, have you noticed an increase in alerts concerning foods containing a bacterium, listeria?
Geraldine Zamansky: Exactly. And the head of the National Listeria Center at the Pasteur Institute explained to me that this bacterium is particularly threatening when it is found in dairy products. Fresh cheeses in particular. You should also be wary of raw or smoked foods, cold meats, shellfish … Especially if they have been in the fridge for a long time.
Because listeria is destroyed by cooking, but it loves the cold. This is where it proliferates. The use-by dates are precisely designed to reduce the risks of a proliferation dangerous to health. Because we can only defend ourselves against a small amount of bacteria. Moreover, producers must normally control it systematically.
But does it happen that the dangerous thresholds are exceeded as shown by the alerts of recent days?
These alerts do indeed concern various products such as sheep’s cheese, goat cheese, Saint-Nectaire, etc. But also certain salmon, hams and rillettes. If one of the products on the list is in your fridge, especially destroy it or bring it back to the point of sale. And clean everything because this bacteria can survive in the environment.
The first symptom is fever, sometimes accompanied by headache or body aches. The risk of complications is of course greater in the elderly, and those whose immune defenses are fragile due to chemotherapy, for example.
With a particular threat to pregnant women. Because the expectant mother risks having no particular symptoms when listeria enters her body. The alert often occurs when the bacteria have already managed to reach the fetus and can cause fatal damage.
So we should not allow ourselves a little Christmas gap?
And no, sorry, nine months without your favorite cheese, and a Christmas without salmon, it may seem difficult, but the threat of listeria is very real. It is the second leading cause of food-borne death, behind another bacteria, salmonella.
This can be present in the same type of food, as well as in eggs for example. And if you consult the famous list of alerts, you will see that it has also been the source of recent contaminations. So sorry for this somewhat sad column on Christmas Day, but if it prevents you from becoming intoxicated, we will have precisely contributed to preserving the holiday!
The link to this famous list of alerts here.