"Filthy" is a relative term. It's actually a natural state of affairs for most creatures. Until recently in human history virtually every bite of food we ate had soil and tons of bacteria on it. Most bacteria are harmless or even beneficial. Those that are harmful are kept in check by competition with the others. Cleaning up the situation with constant sanitizing and antibiotics throws the whole thing out of whack.
I constantly have my hands in the soil, handle chicken poop, eat unwashed carrots and other veggies right from the garden, only occasionally wash my hands, and never get a flu shot. I never get sick. I figure it's the same for my chickens.
Also, as I understand it, eggs do not share any of the same pathway as feces. It's like an interior duct pushes outward and deposits the egg. At least that's what Harvey Ussery tells me in one of his books. I'm not 100% clear on it.
Well said. Exactly right....by a germophobe's standards, the world is a filthy place and no place is safe...no surface, no being, no foods, no water.
Salmonella is in all our bowels, so every time you handle a door knob in public, it's likely you are~by transference~ touching someone's butt and all its myriad germs of e.coli, salmonella, etc. I'd much rather lick one of my chickens than ponder how many germs we are exposed to on a daily basis out in the public.
In comparison, chicken dirt is clean dirt and, unless you are regularly giving your flock broad spectrum antibiotics, the germs they possess are about as harmless as a dew drop. You have already been exposed a thousand times over to the strains of e.coli and salmonella in a simple backyard chicken's bowels by the time you eat that egg~raw or cooked~by just existing in this world and having any interaction with the life therein.
Commercial eggs? Wouldn't intentionally set out to eat them cooked or raw, scrubbed and disinfected or not. They are lethal bombs of super germs just waiting to kill someone who thinks, because the eggs are white and in a cooler at the store, approved by the USDA, that they are clean. They are about as clean as a germophobe's hands, stripped of any beneficial bacteria by frequent washing in antibiotic soaps and slathering in hand sanitizer, but exposed and vulnerable to every germ that comes down the pike because of it.
Worrying about a backyard chicken egg is the proverbial swallowing a mule, but gagging on a gnat.
ETA: And the best way to store eggs is not in the refrigerator at all. The best way is right on your counter top in a basket~unwashed and at room temps. Placing them in the fridge merely increases their susceptibility to germ absorption into the egg, as does washing them.