Is it okay to eat rare steak while pregnant?

E. coli and salmonella are food borne illness that come along with undercooked or rare meat.

E. coli is a little dicey and I’m finding conflicting opinions on how real the danger is.

Unlike a steak where the outside is cooked, the biggest concern seems to be with undercooked ground beef (where the outside of the meat could get ground into the inside) and not with a rare steak where the outside (where the bateria could be) is cooked.

Salmonella is nasty and can make you pretty sick but it won’t directly harm your baby.

Another worry is toxoplasmosis.

It’s a parasite that is transmitted by eating infected meat or by ingestion of feces of a cat that has itself recently been infected. Some sites claim that up to one third of the world’s population carry a toxoplasma infection and that you can get it and not even know it. If you’ve been previously infected then you acquire an immunity to subsequent infections.

The crap thing is, if you haven’t had it before but you get it while you’re pregnant, you can transmit this infection to your baby who doesn’t have much of an immune system and it can cause brain damage and blindness. It sounds pretty scary but, even though the cyst form of the parasite is extremely hardy, it is susceptible to high temperatures and is thus killed by thorough cooking, and would be killed within 24 hours in a typical domestic freezer.

It sounds like eating bugers well done, hand washing after handling raw meat and not licking the steak before it hits the bbq should help.

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