Before you put the chicken in the pan, you almost certainly do what everyone learned from their mother: you put it under the tap and rinse it. There is a logic to that. There is also a problem - it is precisely the step that increases the danger rather than reducing it.

Raw chicken can carry bacteria such as campylobacter, which lives in the gut of healthy birds. When a jet of water hits it, those microorganisms do not go down the drain. They spray outwards - across the worktop, across the utensils, across everything standing near the sink.

Dr Cristina López de la Torre, head of the biomedicine department at the European University of Andalusia, puts it plainly: by rinsing, we allow the microorganism to reach food that will not be cooked - salad, bread or fruit.

Miguel Ángel Lurueña, a doctor of food science and technology, adds that rinsing raw chicken helps disperse pathogenic bacteria through the whole kitchen and contaminates surfaces, utensils and other food.

That is where the real risk lies. The chicken ends up in the pan anyway and gets cooked. The salad that was sitting half a metre away does not.

Who it does not pass for in two days. A healthy adult usually recovers in a few days. Children, older people, pregnant women and those with weakened immune systems face something entirely different: severe dehydration, hospital treatment and lasting consequences - irritable bowel syndrome, reactive arthritis, and in more serious cases Guillain-Barré syndrome.

What to do instead. Pat the chicken dry with a single-use paper towel, thrown away immediately. Wash hands before and after touching raw meat. Clean and disinfect every surface that came into contact with it. Keep raw meat separate from food eaten raw. And the last and most important: cook the meat right through, to an internal temperature of 74 degrees.

One of these is a habit, the other is a number. Rinsing under the tap gives you the feeling you have done something; a thermometer reading 74 tells you that you actually have. If you have to give up one of the two steps, you already know which.