The topic this year is food safety. We've assembled the mission models, and right now two of us (no names mentioned) are working on building our robot, which we plan to make a synchro drive. The other two of us are researching. Now, we racked our brains for a problem, and came up with something.
Research has been going well! We've contacted a few experts on a few of our ideas. We have decided on a problem and it is salmonella outbreaks from eggs. A few of our ideas are vaccinating the egg-laying hens, irradiating the eggs, pasteurizing the eggs, using a bacteriophage, and using competitive exclusion.
Irradiation is the process of putting materials under radiation to kill microbes on or in the material. A common misconception about it is that it will leave food radioactive, but this won't happen any more than putting luggage through an x-ray machine will leave the luggage radioactive. When used on eggs, it will weaken the yolk, and some people have reported a noticeable change in flavour, though others haven't. Other common misconceptions are that irradiation will leave free radicals in food and diminish the nutritional value. It won't leave many free radicals, so that shouldn't be a problem, and the diminishment of the nutritional value is very slight.
Pasteurization is when you heat the eggs then quickly cool them. This pasteurizes them. In the process it kills the bacteria. The down side is it only kills off most of the salmonella. It also increases the price of the eggs to almost double the normal price.
Vaccinations are another way to stop salmonella. The way a vaccine works is it injects salmonella bacteria that are inactive. The vaccine causes the immune system to develop antibodies for salmonella. If another salmonella infection follows, the immune system will kill the salmonella before it can cause illness because of the antibodies.
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