My dad was a veterinarian in the meat animal industry so here is an explanation of why medium rare is a thing with steaks, but not chicken:
In beef, what you worry about is e. coli. In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering. The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there. So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it. Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”.
With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken. Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat. As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen. That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then. However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well. The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg.
As a side note, with pigs the concern is trichinosis, a parasite that used to be common in pigs and spread to humans through under-cooked pork. However, it has been essentially eliminated in commercially produced pork these days. It should be safe now to eat “medium rare” pork, but trichinosis was so horrible and the fear of it so ingrained that it is rare to see pork that is not well done.
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