Avoid Turkey's Revenge

You may have heard of Montezuma’s revenge, but you’ve probably never heard of the turkey’s revenge. Until now that is.

In 2004, reports began streaming into the local public health department just days after Thanksgiving in Cedar Falls, Iowa. More than 100 people who were served a church-sponsored Thanksgiving meal by the local Hy-Vee grocery store reported that they had developed some combination of vomiting, nausea fever, diarrhea, cramps and chills. The most prevalent of the afflictions were diarrhea and cramps.

“The most plausible hypothesis for the … outbreak is that the turkey was cooked and stored at inappropriate temperature,” according to the Black Hawk Public Health Department investigation report quoted on the Marler Clark LLP law firm blog, which tracks food poisoning outbreaks.

The inappropriate cooking and storage “allowed for rapid development of Clostridium perfringens.”

Beware of the Bird: Don't serve up food poisoning with the turkey this year. Leaving a cooked turkey on the counter could lead to the development of illness-causing bacteria.

Click here for more information about Clostridium perfringens.

Don’t become yet another turkey statistic.

Most people know to cook their turkey to 165 degrees to kill bacteria. But spores of Clostridium perfringens, a nasty bug that turkeys carry and a common cause of food poisoning, will still survive, said Mindy Brashears, director of Texas Tech University’s International Center for Food Industry Excellence, in a press release earlier this month.

“Even if your turkey is cooked well, you could run into problems if you leave it sitting out all day,” Brashears said.

In 2000, the liberal advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest issued a “leftovers alert” because “a large percentage of food-poisoning outbreaks linked to turkey were caused by bacteria that grow in fully-cooked food that is left out too long or is not chilled thoroughly.”

The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that C. perfringrens and another bacteria accounted for 52% of all the food poisoning cases associated with turkey between 1990 and 1997. This assessment was based on data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

From 1990 through 2005, the CDC has recorded over 6,000 instances of turkey-related illnesses and 111 outbreaks. Click here for more information about illnesses and outbreaks.

Brashear recommends these steps to avoid turkey’s revenge:

Refrigerate the leftovers as soon as the meal is finished. Cut the meat off bones and store the leftovers in smaller containers, rather than larger ones. It takes longer to chill in a larger container.

Her bottom line is “you want to avoid keeping food in what I call the temperature danger zone,” she said. “Either keep it cold or keep it hot.”