“If I buy chicken at the grocery store, should I assume it’s safe for me?” asks the interviewer in the Netflix documentary “Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food.”

“Your primary assumption should be that it contains pathogens such as  Salmonella and Campylobacter,” replies the food safety expert.

Thorough cooking can kill both bacteria, yet Salmonella still sickens about 1.35 million people in the U.S. every year and Campylobacter strikes 1.5 million. That needn’t be.

For decades, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (Nutrition Action’s publisher) has been working to clean up the food supply. (In fact, CSPI director of regulatory affairs Sarah Sorscher appears in “Poisoned.”)

The good news: In recent months, our long fight to make poultry safer has started to pay off.

Salmonella in raw chicken

In 2021, CSPI and other food safety advocates petitioned the USDA to set enforceable limits on the most dangerous strains of Salmonella in raw poultry by treating those bacteria as an “adulterant.” (That’s how the USDA treats the most dangerous E. coli bacteria in beef.)

In July, the USDA agreed. It proposed a new rule that would ban raw poultry with high levels of the three strains of Salmonella (Enteritidis, Typhimurim, and the oddly named I 4,[5],12:i:-) that cause the most illness in people.

We’re urging the USDA to add to the list Salmonella Infantis, which caused a multistate outbreak in 2018 and is often resistant to antibiotics.

Salmonella in stuffed chicken

Raw frozen breaded chicken dishes like Chicken Cordon Bleu or Chicken Kyiv—which are stuffed with butter, vegetables, or other ingredients—make up only about one-tenth of 1 percent of chicken products. Yet they accounted for 5 percent of all food poisoning outbreaks linked to chicken from 1998 to 2020.

Despite package warnings, many people fail to kill Salmonella in these products because they can heat unevenly and may look precooked because they’ve been browned. (Microwaving them isn’t enough.)

In May, the USDA released a final rule that sets enforceable limits on levels of any strain of Salmonella in raw frozen breaded stuffed chicken. It goes into effect in May 2025.

We’ll keep pushing to make our food free of dangerous pathogens like Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. We all deserve a safe food supply.