"...having covered a number of food safety conferences and stories, if you talk to people who study and work in food safety professionally, every single one of them I've talked to, if you ask them "Is there a food that you just won't eat, for food safety reasons?" the answer is raw sprouts.
"Just don't eat raw sprouts. You can cook them, but don't eat them raw. They are impossible to sanitize and their production process is just a culture dish. Forget it."
I've heard that you can alleviate this by adding a bit of vinegar to the soaking and rinsing water - it lowers the pH thus inhibiting the growth of most of the bad bacteria. For the article being discussed it seems like he's intending to cook all of the sprouts he's making so it should be quite safe without using any vinegar.
Or wash them with soap? Sometimes my own home grown sprouts from a certain batch of seeds will all smell manky, but then I wash them with dish soap and then they don't anymore. What does "impossible to sanitize" mean? If I can eat with my hands after washing them with soap, why would sprouts be different?
"...having covered a number of food safety conferences and stories, if you talk to people who study and work in food safety professionally, every single one of them I've talked to, if you ask them "Is there a food that you just won't eat, for food safety reasons?" the answer is raw sprouts.
"Just don't eat raw sprouts. You can cook them, but don't eat them raw. They are impossible to sanitize and their production process is just a culture dish. Forget it."
[1] - About 47 minutes in to http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-595/