Eating raw eggs carries a small but real risk of Salmonella infection. In the United States, roughly 1 in every 20,000 commercially produced eggs is contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis, the bacterial strain most commonly linked to egg-borne illness. For most healthy adults, that means the odds of cracking open a bad egg on any given day are low. But the consequences of hitting that unlucky number can range from a miserable few days to a serious medical emergency, depending on who you are.
How Salmonella Gets Inside an Egg
Many people assume the risk comes from a dirty shell, but contamination often starts before the egg is even laid. When a hen’s ovaries or reproductive tract carry Salmonella, the bacteria can enter the yolk or egg white before the shell forms around it. No amount of washing fixes that. Bacteria can also penetrate the shell after laying, moving through the tiny pores in the shell when temperature shifts create a slight pressure difference that pulls microbes inward.
This means a perfectly clean-looking egg with an intact shell can still harbor bacteria inside. You cannot see, smell, or taste Salmonella contamination.
What Salmonella Infection Feels Like
Symptoms typically appear 6 hours to 6 days after eating a contaminated egg. The hallmark is watery diarrhea, sometimes with blood or mucus, paired with stomach cramps that can be severe. Nausea, vomiting, headache, and loss of appetite are also common. Most people recover in 4 to 7 days without medical treatment, though it can feel like a brutal week.
The real danger is dehydration from prolonged diarrhea and vomiting, which can escalate quickly in vulnerable people. In rare cases, the infection spreads beyond the gut into the bloodstream, requiring hospitalization.
Who Faces the Greatest Risk
For a healthy adult in their 20s or 30s, a bout of Salmonella is unpleasant but usually self-limiting. The stakes are different for several groups. Children younger than five, older adults, and people with weakened immune systems (from chemotherapy, organ transplants, HIV, or chronic conditions like diabetes) are more likely to develop severe infections that can become life-threatening.
Pregnant women face a particular concern. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans specifically recommends that during pregnancy, women should only eat eggs that have been cooked to safe internal temperatures. The risk isn’t just to the mother; severe foodborne illness during pregnancy can affect the developing baby.
Raw Egg Whites and Nutrient Absorption
Beyond bacteria, raw egg whites contain a protein called avidin that binds tightly to biotin, a B vitamin your body needs for energy metabolism, hair growth, and skin health. The bond is essentially irreversible. When you eat raw egg whites, the avidin latches onto biotin in your gut and the whole complex passes through unabsorbed.
The good news: this only becomes a real nutritional problem if you’re eating excessive amounts, roughly a dozen or more raw egg whites per day over an extended period. An occasional raw egg in a smoothie or homemade dressing won’t deplete your biotin stores. Cooking denatures avidin completely, which is why cooked eggs are actually a good source of biotin rather than a drain on it.
How to Reduce the Risk
If you want to use raw eggs in recipes like Caesar dressing, homemade mayonnaise, eggnog, or protein shakes, the simplest safety upgrade is to buy pasteurized eggs. These are sold in their shells at most grocery stores and are clearly labeled. Pasteurization heats the egg enough to kill bacteria without cooking the contents. A USDA-developed process using radio waves and a brief hot-water bath kills 99.999 percent of Salmonella while keeping the egg raw in texture and function. Pasteurized eggs behave identically in recipes.
Proper storage also matters. Keep eggs refrigerated at 40°F or below at all times. Salmonella multiplies rapidly in the temperature range between 40°F and 140°F, so leaving eggs on the counter, even for a couple of hours, gives any bacteria present a chance to grow from a tiny number to a potentially infectious dose. Don’t use eggs with cracked shells, and don’t keep eggs past their expiration date.
If you’re cooking eggs rather than eating them raw, the standard safety threshold is an internal temperature of 160°F, which means fully set whites and yolks. Runny yolks fall short of that target, though the risk from a lightly undercooked egg is lower than from a fully raw one since heat still reduces bacterial counts.
Putting the Odds in Perspective
One contaminated egg in 20,000 sounds reassuringly rare, and for an individual eating a single raw egg, it is. But context matters. The average American eats about 280 eggs per year. If even a fraction of those are raw or undercooked, the cumulative exposure adds up over time. Restaurants, bakeries, and anyone preparing food in volume face higher aggregate risk simply because they’re cracking more eggs.
The 1-in-20,000 figure also represents an average across all U.S. production. Contamination rates vary by flock, region, and farm practices. During outbreaks, the rate in eggs from a specific producer can be dramatically higher. As recently as August 2025, the FDA investigated a Salmonella outbreak traced directly to eggs.
For healthy adults who understand the risk and choose to eat raw eggs occasionally, the probability of getting sick from any single egg is low. Switching to pasteurized eggs for raw preparations drops that already-small risk to nearly zero, with no change in taste or texture. For children, pregnant women, older adults, and anyone with a compromised immune system, cooking eggs fully or using pasteurized products is the straightforward path to avoiding a potentially dangerous infection.