"How Many Cancers Have Been Caused by Arsenic­-Laced Chicken?"
In 2013, Maryland became the first state to ban the feeding
of an arsenic-containing drug to chickens,
which is used to control all the parasites
and gives their meat an appealing pink color.
In 2011, FDA found that the livers of chickens fed this drug
had elevated levels of inorganic arsenic, a known human carcinogen.
In response, the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer,
voluntarily pulled the drug off the U.S. market.
Although, it’s still sold overseas,
including to places that continue to export chicken back to us,
and a similar arsenic-containing drug for use in poultry
is still available in the United States.
But at least the ban kept Maryland farmers from using stockpiles of the drug.
How much arsenic gets into the actually meat, though,
not just the internal organs?
We didn’t know until recently.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
coordinated the purchase of chicken breasts off grocery store shelves
in ten cities across the country,
and found 70% of samples of chicken meat from poultry producers
that didn’t prohibit arsenic drugs were contaminated
with the cancer-causing form of arsenic
at levels that exceeded the safety thresholds originally set by the FDA,
that is before they relented and admitted
there’s really no safe level of this kind of arsenic.
See, when the drug was first approved,
scientists believed its organic arsenic base would be excreted unchanged,
and organic arsenic is much less dangerous than inorganic arsenic.
But guess what appears to convert the drug into the carcinogenic form?
Cooking!
When chicken meat is cooked,
levels of the arsenic-containing drug go down
and levels of carcinogenic arsenic go up,
suggesting the drug may degrade into the cancer-causing
inorganic arsenic species during cooking.
How much cancer are we talking about?
If you estimate that about three-quarters of Americans eat chicken,
then the arsenic in that chicken has potentially been causing
more than 100 cases of cancer every year.
They conclude that eliminating the use of arsenic-containing drugs
in chicken and pig production could reduce the burden
of arsenic-related disease in the U.S. population.
That’s one of the ways arsenic gets into rice.
When we feed arsenic to chickens to pinken their flesh
the resulting arsenic- bearing poultry manure
is then introduced to the environment, the soil, the water
and then the rice can then suck it up from contaminated soil
and be transferred to human beings that don’t even eat chicken.
We’re talking massive environmental contamination from the poultry industry;
nearly 2 million pounds of arsenic has been poured into the environment
every year by the chicken industry alone in the United States.
And now we’re even seeing arsenic in foods sweetened with organic brown rice syrup,
so there’s all these knock-on effects.
It reminds me of the arsenic in apple juice story.
Although the US made lead and arsenic- based pesticides illegal years ago,
they still persist in the soil, so even organic products are not immune.
Yes, there are arsenic deposits naturally found in the Earth’s crust,
and there’s the other industrial contamination and pesticide use,
but arsenic-containing poultry drugs have been deliberately administered
to animals intended for human consumption for 70 years.
Consequently, exposures resulting from use of these drugs
are far more controllable
than are exposures from environmental sources.
And the good news is that thanks to a lawsuit
from the Center for Food Safety and other consumer groups,
3 out of the 4 arsenic-containing drugs fed to poultry
have been officially pulled from the market.