Dr. Peter Beaumont, president of the Australian Medical Association in the Northern Territory , says he may have accidentally discovered how the potentially deadly salmonella bacteria gets inside chicken eggs.
Dr. Beaumont was cooking when he discovered a dead gecko between the inner shell and the membrane of a chicken egg he cracked open. He suspects the gecko entered the chicken before it entered the egg.
“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom. Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world. It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed before the shell was put on it.”
He says the discovery could have wide reaching implications for the egg farming industry, as it may explain how the potentially deadly salmonella bacteria gets into eggs.
He says this could be something geckoes do regularly, and they could be responsible for infecting some eggs with salmonella.
“There are still people poisoned from salmonella from eggs and particularly from chickens that aren’t cooked properly and if there is a simple way of preventing eggs from becoming infected with salmonella, then it could have a significant public health gain.”
Dr Beaumont said his unusual find could be a world first. He has handed the remains of the egg to health authorities who will try to work out exactly how the gecko got inside the egg.
The Australian Egg Corporation said it had never heard of such a case before.
“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed,” said the corporation’s research and development manager, David Witcombe.
“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”
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