Here in our new location, one of the purchases I made was for a
small ozone generator, complete with porous stone for creating
ozonated water. On the several occasions I've done fresh turkey
and the many occasions I've worked with fresh chickens, I've made
up a couple quarts of ozone water and have rinsed the birds out
with it, together with a general wash of the ozone water on their
exterior surfaces.
Has anyone seen data or any evidence that this kills microbes that
can cause problems with birds?
--
Nonny
What does it mean when drool runs
out of both sides of a drunken
Congressman's mouth?
The floor is level.
O3 is one hell of an oxidizer so it does destroy a lot of germs etc.
NIOSH has ozone as immediately dangerous to life and health with a
limit of 5 ppm. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/intridl4.html
I probably picked up more than that fixing things in the old
arcades. :)
Food never really gets sterilized in the true sense. Well, with the
exception of cooking in a pressure cooker which is basically an
autoclave. Cooking just reduces the number of baddies present to
a number most folks can handle. Noting it does nothing to prions
like those that cause CJD.
I'd say it's better than nothing.
There are a lot of claims out there, just googling it turned up
the usual "live forever" style sites. But even limiting it to
.gov or .edu didn't turn up any real articles past one in 1999
where they just lightly discuss using ozone as a "non heat"
method of sterilization.
The only close one I found was on the FDA site.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/GuidanceDocuments/Juice/ucm072524.htm
They have a lot of other related articles.
--
DougW
Can't speak to the issue of birds, but I can say definitely that
ozonated water will kill baddies. I used to work at a cork processing
company that dealt with wine closures and I built a system that we used
to spray ozonated water on the corks. The system was intended to
increase the moisture content of the closures and at the same time kill
bacteria on the cork at the point of bagging for shipment to the winery.
A proprietary system, we received kudos from the customers for the low
level of creepys on our cork.
As for the issue of chickens, I cannot say that there is anything in the
ozonated water that would be undesirable in contact with food, but the
ozone is very corrosive to anything except stainless steel. The last
point is that we found that in order to be truly effective, the ozone
concentration had to be high enough that you could smell it. It smells
"tinny" or metallic to me. What that level was escapes me, as the techs
at QC would make measurements and give approval.
Dave T.