Does your child love homemade chocolate mousse? Or mayo fries? Be careful, these dishes are dangerous for toddlers: they can lead to serious poisoning.
Raw eggs contain many microbes
It’s difficult to refuse your child a chocolate mousse or a tiramisu. And yet: these gourmet desserts can be more dangerous than they seem.
In a video posted on Instagram, Dr Océane Sorel, doctor in virology & immunology, warns about dishes and desserts that can be toxic and risky for young people. These include:
- Homemade chocolate mousse;
- Tiramisu;
- From the mayo maison;
- Boiled eggs;
- Real carb pasta (with raw egg yolk, not cream);
- Fried eggs (unless the yolk is cooked).
If these specialties are dangerous, it is because they all contain raw egg yolks.
But these latter “may contain microbes that can be dangerous for children, such as salmonella, for example“, underlines the expert, before adding that”young children, just like pregnant women, the elderly and immunocompromised patients, can more easily get food poisoning which can be serious, such as salmonellosis for example..”
She adds that only cooking kills salmonella. “However, in boiled eggs and fried eggs the yolk of the egg is raw or even very undercooked and can therefore potentially contain live bacteria, which explains why they are not recommended; it is better to opt for very cooked forms of the egg up to 5 years old!“, she concludes.
Although salmonellosis is a generally benign infectious disease, in children it can cause complications, such as septicemia (a generalized inflammation of the body, editor’s note). The risk of dehydration – potentially fatal in a toddler – is also much higher.
Also note: salmonella is not only present in raw egg yolks, but also in raw meat, raw fish, etc.
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How to recognize salmonellosis in a baby?
Salmonellosis manifests itself by nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fever and diarrhea, often bloody and mucus. These symptoms can last several days, up to a week.
