The week before last an article appeared on the L.A. Times website entitled "Arsenic-containing drug in chicken feed to be pulled from U.S." and, as you can imagine, I had the reaction that became the title of this memo.
Now I already know that a lot of chickens people eat in the U.S. are given drugs. This is because they're often raised in conditions where they are tightly packed together so disease can spread easily. Oh, yes - it's also because they spend a good deal of their lives standing in their own feces. (The movie Food Inc. let me actually see this.) They're also given special things in their feed to help them fatten up fast (enter mental images of chickens so disproportional they can't walk properly if at all). The market needs big chickens now, darn it.
According to the Times, this particular drug being pulled off the market was for gaining weight and preventing an intestinal disease. And this drug had organic arsenic in it. They (FDA? drug maker?) found chickens who ate this feed ended up having more inorganic arsenic in their livers than chickens who did not. And the inorganic form is a known carcinogen for humans. Yet, the FDA stressed that the levels of inorganic are low, so eating chicken right now (as the drug is pulled off the market) does not pose a health risk.
Wait a minute. No health risk? I guess so, if you look at it as just eating one tiny-bit-poisoned chicken. But carcinogens/bad-for-us chemicals have this tendency to build up in our bodies as our bodies have a harder time flushing them out. So if you've eaten 25 bit-o-arsenic-fed chickens in the last year, is that considered a health risk? I have no idea. I hope for all our sakes it isn't. The trouble is that chicken was probably not your only source of a little bit of carcinogen in the past year. And we usually don't know or realize how much we might have in our systems.
The good news is with this FDA push, we hopefully won't have to deal with slightly-carcinogenic chicken. The thing that bothers me is even with all I knew, I didn't realize it was a factor in the first place. And so often, we don't even really know where our chickens are coming from, so we wouldn't know if their feed included this drug. It's kind of frustrating.
Read more: Arsenic-containing drug in chicken feed to be pulled from U.S.
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