Disturbing News about the past

'Natural' chickens take flight

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

Four of the nation's top 10 chicken producers have virtually ended a practice that health and activist groups for years charged was causing a public health crisis: feeding broiler chickens low doses of antibiotics to make them grow faster and stay healthy.
Tyson Foods, Gold Kist, Perdue Farms and Foster Farms say they stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion. In addition to ending a practice that Europe banned and McDonald's ended a month ago, the four companies also have severely limited antibiotic use for routine disease prevention, though antibiotics are still used to treat disease outbreaks.

"It is the first time that these companies have admitted to major quantitative reductions in antibiotic use. And it's not just one company but a tier of companies — the top tier of companies," says Margaret Mellon, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group that is a member of the coalition Keep Antibiotics Working.

Groups such as the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association have been calling for an end to low levels of antibiotics in animal feed since the 1990s because it has been linked to human bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics. But while Keep Antibiotics Working and the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics have called loudly for an end the practice, the industry itself has been quietly moving away from it. Tyson Foods, the nation's largest chicken producer, has led the way with a 93% reduction, from 853,000 pounds in 1997 to just 59,000 in 2004. In 2004, less than 1% of the company's broilers received antibiotics, says chief veterinarian Patrick Pilkington.

Perdue Farms stopped using antibiotics for growth promotion about five years ago. "It became obvious that it was a concern," says chief veterinarian Bruce Stewart-Brown. Now at any given farm in the system, only one flock in five years receives antibiotics, either to halt a disease outbreak or because birds are threatened with infection, he says. Chicken flocks can number up to 60,000 birds. As with humans, some years are worse for illness than others. Only 1% of California-based Foster Farms' flocks receive antibiotics, says Donald Jackson, president of the company's poultry division.

Together these four companies account for more than 38% of the broiler chickens produced in the USA, according to Watt Poultry USA's 2005 top broiler company survey. Broiler is the industry term for chickens raised for meat.

Randy Singer, a veterinarian and professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, says the news might help clear up misconceptions about meat safety. Though some people envision chicken soaked in antibiotics, that's not even allowable under food production guidelines of the USDA, he says. "When you use an antibiotic, you're not allowed to slaughter the animal for a certain period of time. There shouldn't be any antibiotic residue on any meat that's sold for consumer consumption," he says. Singer adds that a very low percentage of the birds bought in the supermarket have received an antibiotic, especially the birds at these companies.

Farmers discovered in the 1950s that adding low doses of antibiotics to feed promoted growth. With the rise of intensive industrial farming methods, low-level antibiotics helped compensate for crowded, stressful and sometimes unsanitary conditions — and made chicken the cheapest meat available. Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor the Department of Agriculture tracks antibiotics in poultry. But based on figures from the Animal Health Institute, which represents manufacturers of animal drugs, Mellon estimates that together the companies have stopped using as much as 2 million to 2½ million pounds of antibiotics medically important to humans a year. The change was partly made possible by hardier breeds and better husbandry, Tyson's Pilkington says.

"The industry is certainly making leaps and bounds in this area," he says. "Tyson has made great efforts in housing and preventative health programs, and that effort has paid off." Another impetus has been moves by large-scale purchasers of chicken to require meat from birds not fed antibiotics. As of December, McDonald's has required all its suppliers worldwide to no longer use antibiotics used in human medicine for growth promotion, says company spokeswoman Lisa Howard.

Bon Appétit Management Co., the nation's fourth-largest food service company that provides cafe and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities, implemented a policy in 2004 that doesn't even allow antibiotics for disease prevention. "When you get companies such as McDonald's saying to its suppliers that it will not buy chicken raised on sub-therapeutic antibiotics, the industry takes notice," says Sarah Muirhead, editor of the industry journal Feedstuffs. But why companies are doing it doesn't really matter, says Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The fact is, they deserve real credit for moving in this direction."