I agree Slick.
You can really ruin some meat by over-cooking it can't you? My wife used to cook the worst pork loin known to man. It was definitely safe because at the temperature she carried it to no form of life could ever live in this sterile environment and as an RN she was very concerned about food borne illnesses so she was a strong advocate of the USDA's one size fits all temperature recommendations - and people wonder why hospital food tastes so bad.
But once I explained that health agencies in other countries had lower temperature requirements she began to understand that we often dumb things down for our populace. We don't expect people to think and assume they didn't learn anything in biology or microbiology. These figures are written by people like my ex-sister-in-law. PhD in food and nutrition. Authored several textbooks used in colleges today. Very accomplished academic but a tremendously horrid cook who didn't know you needed to pull the bag of giblets out of the turkey prior to heat blasting the poor bird until it resembled shoe leather. What a waste of a bird.
If you believe in science and microbiology, then you would agree that trichinella is destroyed at 138˚F. Then at 150F, listeria, cyclospora, campylobacter, e-coli, salmonella, staphylococcus and clostridium and a host of others are destroyed keeping in mind these pathogens will only be on the surface of whole cut meats like loins if the meat was treated in a half way sanitary manner prior to cooking. Of course Alan is smoking sausage using minced meat stuffed in a casing and will be cooked slowly at a low temperature. I suspect he has added somewhere around 2-3% salt in his mix which impedes the growth of the above pathogens. However, the cased mince and the smoke makes for a low oxygen environment that is suitable for the growth of botulism that can withstand temperatures up to 250F and is the most lethal substance known to man. To protect against this, I suspect, assuming he doesn't have a death wish, he has used some nitrite which is the only thing outside of pelting the sausages with gamma rays that can protect against this deadly substance.
So 160F is safe but why back over the cat when you've already run over it once? You just have to use some common sense and good hygiene. Oh, and my wife now makes a pork loin that is simply incredible.
