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Common kitchen spices contain salmonella

Do the everyday spices in your kitchen cabinet hide bacteria commonly associated with raw meat, leaving you vulnerable to illness from simply adding seasoning to your food.

It's possible, and not cooking your spices makes you even more vulnerable.

The imported spices in our cabinets could potentially poison us with salmonella, according to a pending report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA told MSN News that it's working to characterize the nature and extent of the public health risk that comes from spices, but it intends to implement the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act to better control facilities manufacturing spices.

The safety of spices is important to FDA and presents numerous challenges due to the diversity of the industry and the fact that spices are widely distributed as ingredients in other products, FDA spokesperson Shelly Burgess told MSN News. Many spices are treated to reduce contamination but spices in general are not risk-free. The New York Times reported that the FDA will soon release a report identifying spices in the U.S. known to contain salmonella, one of the most common food-borne illnesses; the Times wrote that it affects about 1.2 million people in the United States every year, killing 450.

Related Salmonella outbreak sickens 307 in 37 states.

The publication wrote In a study of more than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other imported foods. A study published in the Food Microbiology journal revealed that Mexico and India produce the largest amount of contaminated spices.

Westerners, who tend to add spices to food after cooking, are especially vulnerable; salmonella outbreaks involving pepper were recently traced to supply facilities in Rhode Island and California. Consumers concerned about the safety of spices used in the home should add spices during cooking rather than adding them at the table, Burgess said. It’s also important to follow basic food handling practices — cook, chill, clean and separate.