The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention caused quite a stir recently with its consumer warning on raw chicken.

Don’t bother with washing, it said in an April 26 tweet. Doing so can spread germs from the chicken to other food or utensils.

Well, what did they do that for? The Twittersphere lit into them. Everybody and their mamas recoiled. You would’ve thought someone had died and not just chickens.

Comments ranged from downright comical to cynical to sensible.

One woman wrote: “Wash the chicken. wash it really good and wash anything it touches! But wash the chicken! Oh yeah. wash the chicken and don’t forget to wash the chicken and EVERYTHING it touches but also wash the chicken!”

Another said: “God only knows how many people handled that chicken before it was packaged.”

The CDC stood firm. Not only was it better not to wash raw chicken, the same goes for any poultry, meat or eggs before cooking.

When we wash raw chicken, it said, splattering juices contaminated with bacteria, such as Campylobacter or Salmonella, can easily spread around the kitchen and even onto our clothes.

The tweet seemed to fall into our day from the blue sky, but Brittany Behm, a communication specialist in the CDC’s Division of Foodborne, Waterborne, and Environmental Diseases, said the federal agency regularly posts food safety messages on social media.

In fact, she said, the CDC and USDA have advised people not to wash meat and poultry before cooking for many years.

“This is because germs on the raw meats can spread to other foods, utensils, and surfaces and make people sick,” Behm said in an email. “Thoroughly cooking meat and poultry will kill bacteria, so washing is not necessary.”

Instead, the CDC suggests using a separate cutting board for raw chicken and avoiding placing cooked food or fresh produce on the same cutting board used for the chicken and being sure to wash the used cutting board, utensils, dishes and countertops with hot, soapy water after prepping the chicken.

For those of you still not convinced, consider this — 1 in 6 Americans get sick from eating contaminated food each year in the U.S.

Within just hours of the posting of a short story about the tweet on AJC.com, more than 20,000 people had read the news, 260 people had left comments and half of those had shared it.

I know many people said they’d keep washing their chicken, but I bet there were a lot of other people who started to rethink how they operate when prepping to cook meats.

And if it wasn’t the CDC post, maybe it was the commonsense missive left by Mo Granger of College Park.

“So you’ll buy a pack of ground chicken/turkey/beef and throw it right in the pan ... but you’re grossed out with unwashed pieces of meat?!,” Granger wrote. “At first I thought it was ridiculous not to wash meat until I realized ground meat is not ‘washed’. Whatever you think you’re washing off is ground up in the same packaged ground meat and cooked! Just stop and think about it.”