Shocking documents reveal: America’s chicken industry is putting us all in danger

[unhappycamper]

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/superbug_scandal_documents_reveal_antibiotic_abuse_is_standard_practice_for_the_chicken_industry/



Antibiotic abuse at the country's biggest poultry plants is "standard practice"

Shocking documents reveal: America’s chicken industry is putting us all in danger
Lindsay Abrams
Tuesday, Sep 16, 2014 02:54 PM EST

“Some of the nation’s largest poultry producers routinely feed chickens an array of antibiotics — not just when sickness strikes, but as a standard practice over most of the birds’ lives,” a Reuters investigation of confidential industry documents reveals.

This should be a scandal. When at least 2 million Americans are contracting antibiotic-resistant infections every year, and 23,00 are dying as a result, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that we’re teetering on the edge of the “next pandemic,” the routine use of antibiotics on farms, which are clearly contributing to antibiotic resistance, is unacceptable.

And yet we kind of knew this already. As in: We know that 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to the livestock industry. In a recent report, Consumer Reports tested samples of supermarket chicken, and found that half harbored drug-resistant bacteria. A 17-month-long outbreak of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella linked to Foster Farms chicken sickened hundreds. We also know that the FDA has completely dropped the ball on this. While it’s been considering the issue of antibiotics in livestock since the 1970s, the agency didn’t manage to do anything about it until late last year, when it proposed voluntary guidelines on antibiotics used to promote growth, long understood to be an abuse of the drugs. Since then, other should-be scandals have emerged: the revelation from the FDA’s own internal review that 30 livestock feed additives pose a “high risk” of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistance through food, for example, and the decision, handed down this summer by a federal appeals court, that the agency has no obligation to investigate and ban the use of antibiotics in healthy animals.

What Reuters adds to the conversation is what the NRDC calls an “unprecedented analysis” of specific drug use at five major companies: Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue Farms, George’s and Koch Foods. By looking at “feed tickets,” confidential industry documents that describe the drugs that are added to chicken feed, it found evidence of “standard practice” that extends far beyond sick birds. Chicken growers for George’s, for example, ordered up two antibiotics classified as “critically” and “highly” important in humans explicitly for “increased rate of weight gain.” Tyson ordered the antibiotic bacitracin “for use in the prevention of coccidiosis in broiler flocks, growth promotion and feed efficiency” despite saying that it only uses it to prevent disease, and Koch Foods, a Chicago-based supplier for KFC, called for an antibiotic that’s “highly important” for fighting human infections, contradicting the company’s statement, on its website, that claims otherwise (the website has since been changed). Even Perdue, which is making huge strides in reducing antibiotic use, is using low levels of one antibiotic in feeds. Pilgrim’s, which added low doses of two antibiotics “to every ration fed to a flock grown early this year,” threatened to take legal action against Reuters.

[liberalla]

1. bookmarking to read later

Thanks for posting!

[navarth]

2. Yet another reason I'm glad to be vegetarian. Nt

[Stonepounder]

4. Sorry. One word for you, GMO. n/t

[Stonepounder]

3. Mankind is determined to wipe itself out

in the name of the almighty dollar. Because corporations are people, but corporations don't get sick, aren't bothered by climate change, don't need family leave, don't need health insurance. They just have an insatiable appetite for $$$. And I do mean insatiable.

[logosoco]

5. An insatiable appetite for $$$ and absolutely no regard for living things or the future.

Not a favorable combination, but all too common it seems.

[Warpy]

6. Factory farming

While newly hatched chicks have room to run and scratch, their beaks are already removed. Their lifespan is six weeks, during which they will grow so much they can barely move around, bred for ridiculously large breasts that, if they were allowed a few more weeks, would cause them to topple over and be unable to walk.

Yum.

And that doesn't even cover the prophylactic antibiotics they get so they're not all wiped out by bacteria that aren't a problem in uncrowded back yard chickens.

Thanks, but I'll get the organic chicken and pay through the nose for it because meat should not be cheap. It's different from the factory chicken in that you can't cut the meat with the side of a fork--you actually have to chew it when the chickens get at least an hour of outside time, scratching for chinches and grubs, their natural diet. The meat is much more flavorful than factory farmed chickens raised on grain, alone.

Meat should be a luxury, it always has been for me. I use it mostly in stir fries, getting three meals out of one skinny organic chicken breast.