Quote:
Originally Posted by Pareeeee
Birds and reptiles both naturally have salmonella in their digestive tract. How would a bird, then, catch salmonella?
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There are multiple species, subspecies, strains, and serovars of Salmonella. Some are pathogenic, some aren't. The ones that are pathogenic often only act as pathogens in specific hosts. For example, there is a serovar that can live in chickens without harming them but can cause serious damage to humans. I only study animal to human transmission, so I don't know any specifics about animal to animal transmission, but it's definitely conceivable that a particular species, subspecies, strain, or serovar which lives in snakes could be pathogenic to birds. Likewise, there could be Salmonella in birds which is pathogenic to snakes.
That said, it's actually pretty difficult to become ill from Salmonella contamination. You have to really screw up with your hygiene practices somewhere along the line in order to get enough colony forming units transferred for illness to occur. When you hear about big outbreaks of Salmonella poisoning, it's usually because some piece of equipment has gone several months without any kind of sanitation(in factories this is often the result of some cutting machine or the like having a hidden nook which could not be accessed by their normal sterilization methods)
So yeah, even though a snake's Salmonella could potentially be pathogenic to a bird, common hygiene practices are plenty enough to prevent infection. Heck, the snake could sleep in the bird's food and it would still be safe to eat...assuming the snake doesn't have poop on it.
The moral of the story? Keep eating raw cookie dough. It's delicious, and pretty safe.
but I totally understand what you speak of when you found crazy people
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