The point of the meat is a very personal question. There are those who cannot conceive of eating it if it is not completely cooked, while other people defend tasting it slightly raw, that it bleeds, claiming that it is juicier that way. If you like rare meat, you should know that there is a big difference for your health between undercooking a steak and undercooking a hamburger.
The Finnish Food Safety Agency (Ruokavirasto) has warned about the health dangers of cooking undercooked hamburgers. This is because they are at higher risk of carrying the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli), which in turn produces the Shiga toxin that causes gastrointestinal conditions.
The Finnish Food Safety Agency carried out a study to determine the presence of bacteria in hamburger meat depending on the cooking point and temperature. According to their research, consuming a rare hamburger increases the risk of food poisoning by 30 times.
Their findings concluded that if 12% of hamburgers were served rare, cooked to an internal temperature of about 55ºC, there would be 100 E. coli-related illnesses per 100,000 Finnish residents per year. On the other hand, if hamburgers were cooked completely, the number would drop to three diseases per 100,000 people per year. In this case, these diseases would be caused by cross contamination, as reported by the Finnish Agency.
Refining the data even further, if each hamburger were cooked to perfection, to an internal temperature of at least 60ºC, only 178 people in the entire country would get sick each year from eating it. However, if all hamburgers were served at rare levels, the figure would increase to 5,370 illnesses a year.
To this we must add that, according to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) of the United Kingdom, cooking a burger thoroughly at 70°C for two minutes kills 99.9% of harmful insects that could put human health at risk, as reported by the Daily Mail.
The need to cook a burger thoroughly for health reasons does not apply in the same way to a steak. This is because the harmful insects present in meat are normally limited to the outside of the piece. Therefore, when it is cooked lightly, it is enough to kill the insects, since the most superficial layer comes into contact with the heat.
This is not the case with hamburgers. Since the meat is minced, the insects spread throughout the piece, so if we cook them rare, that heat is insufficient to kill the bugs present inside.
It should be noted that, even in very low doses, the bacteria present in raw meat – E. coli and Salmonella – are susceptible to causing food poisoning. These can, in turn, lead to serious illnesses.
