Playing Chicken - Avoiding Arsenic in Your Meat
By David Wallinga, M.D., The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy - This reports looks at the "decades-old practice" of adding arsenic into chicken feed and links this directly to arsenic residues in U.S. chicken meat.Table of contents
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Executive summary (below)
I. The modern American chicken: Arsenic use in context
II. Concerns with adding arsenic routinely to chicken feed
III. What we found: Arsenic in chicken meat
Appendix B. Testing methodology
References
Executive summary
Arsenic causes cancer even at the low levels currently
found in our environment. Arsenic also contributes to other
diseases, including heart disease, diabetes and declines
in intellectual function, the evidence suggests. Some
human exposure to arsenic stems directly from its natural
occurrence in the earth’s crust. Other arsenic is mined and
then used intentionally, for commercial purposes.
Drinking water, rice, playground equipment — Americans’
daily exposure to cancer-causing arsenic comes from a
variety of sources. Regulatory action has reduced some
of that daily exposure. As advised by multiple bodies of
scientific experts, the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) finally lowered its long-outdated drinking water
standard in 2001, dropping by five-fold the amount of
arsenic legally allowed in tap water, for example.
Arsenic also contaminates many of your favorite foods,
including fish, rice and chicken. Some food contamination
stems from intentional uses of arsenic. In this report we
clearly connect arsenic residues in chicken meat to the
decades-old practice of intentionally putting arsenic into
chicken feed. Of the 8.7 billion American broiler chickens
produced each year, estimates are that at least 70 percent
have been fed arsenic. Some of that arsenic stays in chicken
meat.
We show in Chapter 1 of this report how and why arsenic is
routinely fed to most of America’s chickens. In Chapter 2, we
review some of the latest science on how arsenic impacts
our health, and who is at greatest risk. In short, there are
many science-based reasons to avoid ingesting arsenic,
whatever its form.
Our arsenic testing of the chicken meat that people eat—
the most extensive ever—shows that much of it contains
arsenic. Our testing also indicates that some of America’s
largest chicken producers already successfully raise chickens
in ways that contaminate it with little or no arsenic. See
Chapter 3 for more details.
Even if our testing hadn’t found arsenic in many of America’s
most popular brands of chicken products, there would still
be compelling reasons for producers to stop feeding arsenic
to chickens.
One way or another, putting arsenic in chicken feed means
exposing more people to more arsenic. We estimate from
1.7 to 2.2 million pounds of roxarsone, a single arsenic
feed additive, are given each year to chickens. Arsenic
is an element—it doesn’t degrade or disappear. Arsenic
subsequently contaminates much of the 26-55 billion pounds
of litter or waste generated each year by the U.S. broiler
chicken industry, likely also contaminating the communities
where that waste is generated or dispersed. In the chicken producing
town of Prairie Grove, Mo., house dust in every
one of 31 homes examined was found to contain at least two
kinds of arsenic also found in chicken litter.
Giving arsenic to chickens further adds to an already
significant arsenic burden in our environment from other
intentional, now-banned uses. For example, American grown
rice contains 1.4 to 5 times more arsenic on average
than does rice from Europe, India and Bangladesh—
scientists think the likely culprit is the American practice
of growing rice on former cotton fields contaminated with
long-banned arsenic pesticides. For decades, Americans
also were exposed intentionally to arsenic from the use of
lumber “pressure-treated” with chromated copper arsenate
(CCA), a pesticide mixture that is 22 percent arsenic by
weight. This contaminated lumber, much of it still in use,
carries a familiar greenish hue. The EPA finally ended the
manufacture and sale of CCA-treated lumber in 2004. At
that time, more than 90 percent of all outdoor wood decks,
playground sets and other wooden structures in the U.S.
were made of arsenic-treated wood.
Read the complete 34 page report
Playing Chicken - Avoiding Arsenic in Your Meat
April 2006