Is camembert safe during pregnancy?

What does the evidence say about camembert during pregnancy?

1. If a soft cheese like Camembert has gone through pasteurization, MotherToBaby notes any increased risk from bacteria is very small, and pasteurized soft cheese isn't considered to raise risk during pregnancy. 1
2. MotherToBaby also notes that if a soft cheese hasn't been pasteurized but has been cooked or heated before eating, there's also little increased risk, which is why heating Camembert until steaming is a reasonable substitute when you can't confirm the label. 1
3. Camembert is specifically named on the list of soft cheeses to avoid unless the label confirms pasteurized milk, and any leftovers or ready-to-eat foods should be reheated to steaming, at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit, to add a margin of safety. 2
4. In a 2013 multistate listeriosis outbreak tied to soft-ripened cheese, contamination was traced to sanitation gaps that occurred after the milk was already pasteurized, showing pasteurization alone doesn't fully close the risk; one of the affected patients was pregnant and had a miscarriage. 3
5. A separate multistate outbreak found patients who got sick were far more likely to have eaten Camembert than people who stayed healthy, and 9 of the illnesses in that outbreak were pregnancy-associated, with listeria confirmed in maternal blood or placental tissue in six of the mothers. 4

Is camembert safe in each trimester?

• First trimester. Listeria infection is a concern across all of pregnancy, and there's no trimester where soft-ripened cheese becomes lower-risk. Early pregnancy is a reasonable time to build the habit of checking labels for the word pasteurized before buying Camembert.
• Second trimester. The same pasteurized-label check and steaming-heat approach applies here. If you're craving a cheese board, warmed or baked Camembert, heated until it's steaming throughout, is a way to still enjoy it.
• Third trimester. Listeria infection late in pregnancy has been linked to miscarriage and fetal loss in the outbreak data on soft-ripened cheese, so this is not a trimester to loosen the pasteurized-and-heated approach. If you're unsure whether a cheese was pasteurized, the lower-risk choice is to skip it.