• The U.S. chose not to force hens to get vaccinated for Salmonella. They claimed there wasn’t enough evidence that it did anything. (And it wouldn’t raise costs much; it’d cost less than a penny per dozen eggs.) With the very large egg-tainting problem in the U.S., it’s probably good to look at what happened after Britain mandated hen vaccinations:

• 14,771the number of cases in England and Wales caused by the most common strain of salmonella in 1997, the year a new hen vaccine was tested by the country’s farmers
• 581the number of cases in England and Wales last year, a decrease of 96 percent; the hen vaccine, which has been in use since 1998, has helped lead to yearly declines source

• » So why didn’t they? Well, the FDA, while it claims that it looked at the vaccine seriously, said that there were significant differences between the U.S. version of the vaccine and the British one. The vaccine-maker, however, says that the differences were minor and the drugs were equally effective. Meanwhile, the current recall is at around 550 million eggs.

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink