A chicken dinner laced with arsenic might be what major poultry producers ordered, but Douglas Gansler, the attorney general of Maryland, vehemently disagrees in a column for The Washington Post. Arsenic, he argues, runs rampant in the United States, infecting our ice water, coffee, air and chicken -- much to the shock of citizens.
In 1944, the Food and Drug Administration approved the feed additive roxarsone, an arsenic compound. Poultry producers used the additive to increase growth in chickens and fight off parasites. Gansler says that exposure to roxarsone -- a Class A carcinogen that has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and declines in brain function -- has been harmful to the population. Findings indicate that most Americans are exposed to between 3 and 11 times the EPA’s safety limit of such chemicals, and those most at risk include small-scale chicken farmers and their neighbors.
The European Union outlawed the use of roxarsone in chicken feed in 1999, and some American producers have followed suit. But in 2006, 70 percent of the broiler chickens produced in the U.S. were fed roxarsone, and the compound has environmental repercussions too. Gansler says more than 1.2 billion pounds of chicken waste is generated in Maryland alone, and the run-off contaminates crops, lakes, rivers, lawns, and potentially drinking water. “Meanwhile,” he writes, “The poultry industry labors under the legal fiction that although it owns the chicken feed and the chickens that eat the feed, it has no responsibility for the chicken manure.” (Read more)
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