Finnish Food Safety Agency Warns Against Eating Burgers Cooked Less Than Well-Done

It's time to consider whether a juicier burger is worth the extra risk.

No one raises an eyebrow about ordering a steak cooked medium, but one government agency is warning against eating burgers served anything less than well-done. Ruokavirasto, the Finnish food safety agency, says that ground beef patties that are only cooked to medium-rare or medium internal temperatures (less than 140°F) are at risk for carrying the Shiga toxin-producing E.coli bacteria known as STEC.

Food Safety News reported that the agency performed a simulation to determine the number of E. coli illnesses that would result if burger patties were cooked at different temperatures. Their results determined that if 12% of all burger patties were served medium — meaning an internal temperature of around 55°C or 131 °F — then there would be 100 burger-related illnesses for every 100,000 residents in Finland annually. If the burger patties were fully cooked, then there would be three illnesses for every 100,000 people, and the agency suggests that those illnesses would be caused by “cross-contamination” in the kitchen.

The agency expanded on their data even further, adding that if every ground beef patty in the country was “cooked to perfection” — meaning an internal temperature of at least 60°C or 140°F — then 178 people in Finland would become ill from eating those burgers every year. But if the burger patties were all served to only medium levels of doneness, then that number would increase to 5,370 illnesses annually.

The actual numbers are on the lower end of the spectrum: Ruokavirasto reported that there were fewer than 300 STEC-related illnesses reported in 2022. (In addition, 5% of Finns who were infected with E. coli between 2001 and 2020 reported that they had eaten “raw or undercooked meat” before developing symptoms.)

“'We cook food in part to kill off all these harmful bacteria that can make us ill or even kill us. You need to raise the temperature to lethal levels, at least 71C or higher, for long enough to kill any bacteria that are living in the food,” Dr Kimon-Andreas Karatzas, an associate professor of food microbiology at the University of Reading, told the Daily Mail.

“If you eat rare burgers, there is a much higher chance that any disease-causing bacteria inside will not have been heated up enough sufficiently to kill them, so they can still be alive and may then multiply in your body, making you potentially very sick.”

In 2021, Finnish authorities had to issue a warning after an outbreak of E. coli infections was connected to burger patties. At the time, Ruokavirasto encouraged any restaurant that served its hamburgers medium or medium-well to warn customers about the potential risk for E.coli, to ask every adult customer how they wanted their burger cooked, and only to serve fully cooked burgers to children.

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