Salmonella. Have YOU caught it from your reptiles?

[MrLang]

Salmonella is transmitted via feces and is not airborne. Only an infected animal can transmit it through their feces. An animal that hatched from an egg cannot be born infected with it (conceivable for a mammal?). Due to its prevalence in the world and ease of transmission, nearly all domestic animals have some amount of it living in their intestines. Yes, this means most animals swap the bacteria around by making contact with each other's poop. Everyone poops.

We ingest salmonella all the time as it is exists in our kitchens and fridges (it got there from meat and produce). Freezing does not kill it. In small quantities, our stomach acid kills the bacteria and we see no ill effects. To get infected, you need to have a weakened immune system (child, elderly, or ill) and/or ingest a fair quantity of it.

Now let's lump those sets of information together and do a little risk assessment.

Reptile:
Captive bred, individually cared for, individually housed with other sterile animals and cleaned up after. The sources of contamination (meaning the animal actually becomes a carrier) are your own hands, its food, or its poop having exposure to either of the first 2 things and then re-ingested by the animal or yourself in poop form. To get sick from the actual animal would, again, require you to ingest its poop in a high enough quantity to become ill. You typically clean an individual reptile's cage once a week on average, so your exposure is limited to that small window of time.

Your food:
Meat:
Often bred literally into a pile of excrement made by an adult carrier of the bacteria, housed shoulder to shoulder or literally piled on top of other individuals who are literally guaranteed to be carriers, and cleaned up after only to the minimum degree that is required by the law. If the animal was raised in another country, presumably the laws are varying levels of strictness (in terms of cleanliness required in the farming and butchering). The animals are often butchered in the same facility they were raised in and come into contact with a number of instruments and workers who are exposed to large amounts of waste and who are desensitized to its grossness.
Produce:
The same animals mentioned above poop, and that poop is thrown all over the designer lettuce you have on your cobb salad while it's being propagated as fertilizer. It can become contaminated by this poop or by the poop it encounters on the truck to the market, the farmer who grew it, etc. Presumably this produce is grown in another country and, again, the laws may not even require the farmer to rinse the goods between harvest and transport to your local supermarket. Even to make produce look presentable they would only need to worry about rinsing the outer surface of the fruit/vegetable. We eat produce and meat every day, so your exposure is limited to 3 meals a day or however often you eat.

Assuming you don't clean your animal's cage bare handed, pick its poop up with your fingers, and then eat some chicken nuggets bare handed (like the people who work at the farm), it's pretty clear where more risk lies. You won't get salmonella by picking up your snake. Aquatic turtles are high-risk because they literally swim in their own poop if their cage is dirty. This means that simply by picking up the animal you could be exposed to a large enough amount of the bacteria to get infected.

People blow whistles and write articles about reptiles because it gets attention. People do studies on it because they couldn't think of another grant proposal. The bottom line here is that if you don't pick up poop with your bare hands and then eat with them, you're WAY more likely to get salmonella poisoning from your food.

Wall of text crits. It's super effective...