Last week, an editor for Slate magazine, L.V. Anderson, wrote an article entitled: "Salmonella and raw eggs: How I've eaten tons of cookie dough and never gotten sick". In it, she says that she has eaten about 360 raw eggs in her lifetime and has never contracted a Salmonella infection. From that, she infers that raw cookie dough is not really dangerous. This story is full of logical fallacies. First, she is committing the logical fallacy of a small sample size: herself. Extrapolating from her personal experiences to the entire nation is extremely foolish. The plural of anecdote is not data. In addition, she may have gotten sick from eating a Salmonella-contaminated egg, but didn't even know it. The incubation period for these infections is up to three days, so she most likely did … [Read more...]