Banned Drugs Found in Our Poultry

Before you buy that chicken from your Von’s produce department, ask yourself, “Is it good for me?”

A recently released study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and Arizona State University found that a class of antibiotics banned by the U.S. government for poultry production arevstill in use.

Results of the study are published in Environmental Science & Technology. Read more about the report here.

The study looked for drugs and other residues in feather meal. Among the drugs researchers said they found were fluoroquinolones — a type of antibiotics used to treat serious bacterial infections in people, particularly those infections that have become resistant to older antibiotic classes, officials said.

Officials said they found the banned drugs in 8 of 12 samples of feather meal in a multi-state study. The findings were a surprise to scientists because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned fluoroquinolone use in U.S. poultry production in 2005, officials said.

This is the first time investigators have examined feather meal, a byproduct of poultry production made from poultry feathers, to determine what drugs poultry may have received prior to their slaughter and sale, according to researchers.

“The discovery of certain antibiotics in feather meal strongly suggests the continued use of these drugs, despite the ban put in place in 2005 by the FDA,” said David Love, PhD, CLF Project Director and lead author of the report. “The public health community has long been frustrated with the unwillingness of FDA to effectively address what antibiotics are fed to food animals.”

"We believe antibiotics are appropriate for chickens like they are for our children and our pets, for treating sick birds," Bill Mattos from the California Poultry Federation told KTVU CBS in northern California.

“We do put antibiotics into the flock to treat it but that is done a very minute amount of time,” Mattos told the station in defense of the practice. “We think about 50 percent of the time throughout the year. We don't believe there's been any link to the poultry medications that we use and what's resistance in humans.”