Weblog
02/10/02 01:56 PM: Finally…
From the New York Times: Three companies – Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and Foster Farms, which produce a third of the chicken consumed by Americans each year – say they have voluntarily taken most or all of the antibiotics out of what they feed healthy chickens.
Apparently it took September 11 to get this to happen, too. More specifically, the whole anthrax scare. Pumping animals full of antibiotics can lead to the development of strains of bacteria which are resistant to the antibiotics that would normally kill them. Technically, those strains were already around before antibiotics and they just become more prevalent as the antibiotics come into widespread use and the nonresistant strains get killed off. But that is beside the point. The point is that one of the antibiotics frequently given to chickens was similar to Cipro, which is used against anthrax in humans. People got scared that by eating chicken with that particular antibiotic could lead to Cipro-resistant anthrax, or something along those lines. Well, apparently McDonalds, Wendy’s, and other huge chicken purchasers didn’t like the sound of that, so they said they would no longer buy chickens that had been fed that particular antibiotic. If my memory serves me, McDonalds is the largest chicken buyer in the world. Obviously, when the world’s largest chicken buyer talks, the world’s largest chicken supplier listens.
