Corrected July 25, 2026. An earlier version of this post said that the United States does not vaccinate laying hens and that the British government requires vaccination. Both were wrong. Dr. Eric Gingerich, a poultry veterinarian in Zionsville, Indiana, wrote to tell me so, and the record backs him up on both counts. The title, the last three paragraphs and the closing line have been rewritten. My thanks to him.

Ninety-eight people in 17 states. Twenty-six in the hospital. CDC’s outbreak page went up yesterday, and the illness onsets run from November 21, 2025 to June 30, 2026. Seven months of sick people before a carton came off a shelf.

Midwest Poultry Services recalled 1,589,577 dozen shell eggs on July 22 — 19 million eggs — out of two Texas farms, sold as Kroger, Simple Truth, Brookshire’s, Cal-Maine and Country Morning. FDA says laboratory, epidemiologic and traceback data point at those eggs, and it is still looking for others. Farm environmental samples matched the outbreak strain by whole genome sequencing.

Americans used to drink these on purpose. Rocky cracked five into a glass in 1976 and Stallone actually swallowed them. Vince Gironda, the Iron Guru who trained Schwarzenegger, sold raw eggs as recovery food. Fighters drank them because it beat cooking. Then the gyms quit, in the late 1980s, on the sound theory that a fighter dehydrated on a bathroom floor does not make weight. The protein math was wrong anyway — a raw egg surrenders about half its protein, a cooked one about ninety percent. The trainers figured it out before the regulators did.

What scared them had a name, and she paid for it. In December 1988 Edwina Currie, a junior health minister in Britain, said “Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella.” Egg sales collapsed overnight. Two million hens went to slaughter, the farmers came for her, and she was gone in two weeks — the woman who wrecked an industry with one sentence.

She was right. A Whitehall report written months after she resigned and buried until 2001 found Britain in the middle of a Salmonella epidemic of considerable proportions. By her own account: 500 people a week sick enough for a hospital bed, some on dialysis, about 60 dead that year.

Then Britain vaccinated the hens — though not by law, which is the part I got wrong. The British Lion Code, 1998, is an industry scheme run by the British Egg Industry Council, and the Lion mark is a registered trademark its subscribers may use only on eggs produced to the code. To carry it: Salmonella vaccination of laying flocks against both Enteritidis and Typhimurium, hygiene and temperature controls, testing of flocks and of eggs beyond what the National Control Programme requires, traceability back to the farm, a date stamped on the shell, and independent unannounced audits. It covers more than 90 percent of British eggs. The government sets the floor. The industry built the rest. In October 2017 the Food Standards Agency took down its own thirty-year warning and told pregnant women, babies and the elderly that Lion eggs were safe raw.

Not a clean win, and I won’t sell it as one. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found at least 100 cases over the three years after that announcement. FSA’s own risk profile shows farm detections climbing since 2017 and one stubborn Enteritidis cluster that reached 109 cases, most of them people who had eaten Lion eggs. England booked 10,406 salmonellosis cases in 2025, its worst in a decade — though Enteritidis, the serovar the Lion Code vaccinates against, went the other way, from 3,166 reports in 2024 to 3,104 in 2025. FSA weighed all of it and left the advice standing. Vaccination did not eradicate anything. It bought a reduction deep enough, and durable enough, that a government could stop warning mothers off soft-boiled eggs and hold that line when the numbers were checked again.

Now ours. Four agencies touch eggs, which is why nobody can answer this question at a dinner party. USDA’s FSIS has egg products — liquid, frozen, dried — continuous inspection, mandatory pasteurization. USDA’s AMS grades shell eggs and screens out the cracked and the dirty. USDA’s APHIS certifies hatcheries. The carton in your refrigerator belongs to FDA.

FDA’s Egg Safety Rule has been on the books since 2009. Producers with 3,000 or more hens, eggs not pasteurized: buy pullets from monitored suppliers, keep a biosecurity plan, control the rodents, disinfect after a positive, swab the house at 40 to 45 weeks and again after a molt, test the eggs if the swab comes back hot, refrigerate at 45°F starting 36 hours after lay. FDA figured it would cut egg-borne SE illness by about 60 percent, and prevent about 30 deaths a year. The farms see an inspector every three to five years We vaccinate the hens.

Twice. A laying house gets swabbed twice in a flock’s productive life, and the farm gets a visitor once or twice a decade. Midwest Poultry says its own monitoring is what caught this. Ninety-eight people got there first.

Here is what the rule has produced. Every multistate Salmonella outbreak traced to American shell eggs since FDA wrote it:

• 2010 — Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, Iowa. S. Enteritidis. CDC counted 3,578 illnesses between May 1 and November 30 against a baseline of about 1,639 — roughly 1,939 illnesses likely tied to the outbreak. Half a billion eggs recalled, still the largest shell egg recall in American history.
• 2015 and 2016 — Good Earth Egg Company, Bonne Terre, Missouri. S. Oranienburg, twice, the same strain both times. Fifty-two sick in six states, then eight sick in three states with two hospitalized, after which Missouri closed the operationWe vaccinate the hens. Nobody checks the work.
• 2018 — Rose Acre Farms, Hyde County, North Carolina. S. Braenderup. Forty-five sick in 10 states, 11 hospitalized, 206,749,248 eggs recalled. FDA’s warning letter found the outbreak strain in the processing plant and in manure from laying house No. 9, and laying houses rife with rodents.
• 2018 — Gravel Ridge Farms, Cullman, Alabama. S. Enteritidis. Forty-four sick in 11 states, 12 hospitalized — a 32 percent hospitalization rate against a 20 percent norm.
• 2024 — Milo’s Poultry Farms, Bonduel, Wisconsin. S. Enteritidis. Ninety-three sick in 12 states, 34 hospitalized, onsets from May 23 to September 13.
• 2025 — August Egg Company, Hilmar, California. S. Enteritidis. One hundred thirty-four sick in 10 states, 38 hospitalized, one death in California. Onsets February 24 to June 6. 1.7 million dozen recalled.
• 2025 — Country Eggs, LLC, Lucerne Valley, California. S. Enteritidis. One hundred five sick in 14 states, 19 hospitalized, onsets January 7 to August 14 — seven months, again.
• 2026 — Midwest Poultry Services. S. Enteritidis. Ninety-eight sick in 17 states, 26 hospitalized, 1,589,577 dozen recalled.

About 2,500 counted illnesses, and counted is doing the work — these are only the multistate investigations. Four of them landed in the last three years. The last two each ran seven months before anyone pulled a carton. That is not a story about bad actors. It is a story about the interval between swabs.

Vaccination is the one thing the rule does not require. FDA looked at it in 2009 and decided the efficacy data weren’t strong enough to let a vaccine stand in for any prevention measure, and that finding has never been reopened. Here is what I missed: it did not need to be, because the industry vaccinates anyway. USDA’s National Animal Health Monitoring System surveyed 328 table-egg farms across 19 states and found 89.9 percent had vaccinated their layers as pullets, another 9.1 percent as pullets and again as layers, and 1.0 percent not at all. The most common protocol, on 39 percent of farms, was two live S. Typhimurium sprays followed by an inactivated bacterin injection, with about half of those farms giving the first dose at the hatchery. USDA also found that flocks vaccinated as pullets were markedly less likely to test positive for SE. Vaccination works. We already do it.

So the ask I closed with was the wrong ask. The hens were already vaccinated. Ninety-eight people got sick anyway, across seven months, and nobody pulled a carton until the seventh.

What Britain has that we do not is not the needle. It is everything built around it. Lion producers are audited independently and without warning. Lion eggs are tested, not just the houses they came from — USDA found 96.3 percent of American farms testing their layer-house environments and 5.8 percent testing eggs. Lion eggs carry a date on the shell and a record back to the flock. Our farms swab twice in a laying hen’s productive life and see an FDA inspector every three to five years. Between the swab and the carton there is nothing but time, and this time it was seven months of it.

We vaccinate the hens. Nobody checks the work.