Is soft cheese safe during pregnancy?

The verdict

Most soft cheese is fine. The rule that matters is not soft versus hard - it is whether the cheese has a white mould rind, blue veining, or is made from unpasteurised milk.

Safe as they come: pasteurised mozzarella, feta, ricotta, mascarpone, burrata, halloumi, paneer, cream cheese, cottage cheese and processed cheese spreads. The NHS lists all of these explicitly as safe to eat.

Cook first: brie, camembert, chevre with a white rind, and soft blue cheeses such as gorgonzola, roquefort and Danish blue. Any of these is safe once it has been cooked until steaming hot all the way through - baked camembert is fine, camembert on a cheeseboard is not.

Avoid: anything made from unpasteurised milk unless it has been thoroughly cooked.

Why these cheeses and not others

The organism is Listeria monocytogenes. It is uncommon, but pregnancy changes both the odds and the stakes. The FDA states that pregnant women are about 10 times more likely to get listeriosis than other healthy adults, and that an estimated 1 in 6 of all listeria cases occur in pregnant women. The CDC puts the absolute risk at about 1 in 25,000 pregnancies a year - and reports that 1 in 4 pregnant women who get listeriosis lose their pregnancy or their baby shortly after birth. The illness itself is often mild or flu-like in the mother. The harm is to the pregnancy.

Listeria's defining property is that refrigeration does not stop it. It grows at fridge temperatures, which is why a use-by date and a cold fridge are not sufficient protection on their own, and why cooking - which does kill it - is the intervention every agency reaches for.

Soft mould-ripened and blue cheeses are singled out because of moisture and acidity. They are wetter and less acidic than a hard cheese, which makes them a more hospitable growth medium. That is why UK guidance treats a pasteurised brie differently from a pasteurised cheddar: pasteurisation kills listeria present in the milk, but it does not stop the finished cheese being recontaminated during ripening and then supporting growth in the fridge.

How to make an unsafe cheese safe

Heat. Cooking until steaming hot all the way through kills listeria. FSANZ specifies an internal temperature of 75C for baked soft cheese; the CDC specifies 165F, which is 74C. Warming through is not enough - a brie melted onto toast under a grill for a minute has not reached temperature in the middle.

This applies to restaurant food too. A goat's cheese salad served cold uses uncooked rinded cheese. A goat's cheese tart out of the oven does not.

If you have already eaten some

Almost certainly nothing will happen, and there is no test or treatment given preventively on the basis of an exposure alone.

What matters is symptoms, and the timing is unusual: ACOG notes that listeriosis symptoms may appear as late as two months after eating contaminated food. Watch for fever, chills, muscle aches, diarrhoea or upset stomach, and less commonly a stiff neck, headache, confusion or loss of balance. If you develop a fever after eating an at-risk food, contact your midwife or doctor and say what you ate and when - listeriosis is treatable with antibiotics, and treatment during pregnancy is what protects the baby.

If a cheese you have eaten is subject to a product recall, contact your maternity team even without symptoms. That is the one scenario where clinicians will actively monitor or test.

Where guidance genuinely differs

This is one of the clearest international splits in pregnancy food safety, and it is not a matter of one country being out of date.

The UK cooks pasteurised brie. The US does not. The NHS says that pasteurised or unpasteurised mould-ripened soft cheeses with a white coating on the outside, such as brie, camembert and chevre, must be thoroughly cooked - the pasteurisation status is explicitly irrelevant. ACOG says the opposite in as many words: avoid raw milk soft cheeses like feta, brie or queso blanco, but soft cheeses made with pasteurized milk are safe to eat. A pasteurised brie is a cooked-only food in London and a normal food in New York.

The CDC does not fully agree with ACOG either. Its 2025 guidance moves pasteurised feta and mozzarella onto the safer side of the table, while flagging queso fresco-type cheeses - queso fresco, queso blanco, requeson - as riskier even when made with pasteurised milk. This is driven by US outbreak data; the FDA notes that pregnant Hispanic women are about 24 times more likely to get listeriosis than other healthy adults, linked to consumption of queso fresco-type cheeses. No UK, Australian or Canadian guidance mentions this cheese family at all.

Canada is the strictest. Health Canada tells pregnant people to avoid soft cheeses such as brie and camembert, semi-soft cheeses such as havarti, and all blue-veined cheeses - unpasteurised and pasteurised alike. Havarti appears on no other country's list.

Australia and New Zealand go by category, not pasteurisation. FSANZ lists soft, semi-soft and surface-ripened cheeses - brie, camembert, mozzarella, ricotta, feta and blue - as higher-risk, with hard cheeses, pasteurised cream cheese, plain cottage cheese and baked soft cheese as safer alternatives. Note that this puts mozzarella, ricotta and feta on the avoid side in Australia and on the safe side in the UK and US. New Zealand's Ministry for Primary Industries takes the same line, naming brie, camembert, feta, blue, mozzarella, ricotta, halloumi and paneer as cheeses to avoid unless cooked.

The strictest reading that satisfies every jurisdiction: eat hard cheese and pasteurised cream cheese freely, and cook everything soft.