Salmonella is a rod shapped bacteria that lives in the intestines of birds and animals and sometimes ends up in food (or water, in our case). Everybody is at risk from salmonellosis, but older people, very young people, or people who have weak immune systems, are at increased risk.
People who get the disease get a fever and diareah, and they might have headaches and nasea. It can be life threatening to those who are at increased risk for the diesease.
It gets into our food from undercooked meat and poultry, and occasionally from eggs. At one time only eggs that were contaminated with feces seemed to transmit the diease but now perfectly fine looking eggs can get salmonella in them before they develop a shell and leave the chicken. All eggs that you eat should be cooked or pasturized first. You can't pasturize eggs at home, at least I haven't seen anything anywhere to indicate this is possible or safe, but you can buy pasturized eggs in the carton in some parts of the country. Otherwise, you should "coddle" your eggs before making hollandaise sauce with them. I have a link to dirrections for this below.
Links:
Egg coddling... the microwave method at the bottom of the page looks easy.
USDA fact sheet about salmonella.
A stuffed giant sallmonella bacterium. Just what you always wanted.
Word of The Day
Bacilli: The plural form of bacillus, which means rod-shaped. Salmonella are bacilli.
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