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The Food and Drug Administration recommends against washing raw chicken due to the risk of transferring dangerous food-borne pathogens through splashed drops of water. Many cooks continue to wash raw chicken despite this warning, however, and there is a lack of scientific research assessing the extent of microbial transmission in splashed droplets. Here, we use large agar plates to confirm that bacteria can be transferred from the surface of raw chicken through splashing. We also identify and create a phylogenetic tree of the bacteria present on the chicken and the bacteria transferred during splashing. While no food-borne pathogens were identified, we note that organisms in the same genera as pathogens were transferred from the chicken surface through these droplets. Additionally, we show that faucet height, flow type, and surface stiffness play a role in splash height and distance. Using high-speed imaging to explore splashing causes, we find that increasing faucet height leads to a flow instability that can increase splashing. Furthermore, splashing from soft materials such as chicken can create a divot in the surface, leading to splashing under flow conditions that would not splash on a curved, hard surface. Thus, we conclude that washing raw chicken does risk pathogen transfer and cross-contamination through droplet ejection, and that changing washing conditions can increase or decrease the risk of splashing.

 

Abstract The semiconductor tracker (SCT) is one of the tracking systems for charged particles in the ATLAS detector. It consists of 4088 silicon strip sensor modules.During Run 2 (2015–2018) the Large Hadron Collider delivered an integrated luminosity of 156 fb -1 to the ATLAS experiment at a centre-of-mass proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The instantaneous luminosity and pile-up conditions were far in excess of those assumed in the original design of the SCT detector.Due to improvements to the data acquisition system, the SCT operated stably throughout Run 2.It was available for 99.9% of the integrated luminosity and achieved a data-quality efficiency of 99.85%.Detailed studies have been made of the leakage current in SCT modules and the evolution of the full depletion voltage, which are used to study the impact of radiation damage to the modules.