Are There Drugs in Your Chicken Dinner?

Fluoroquinolone used to be fed to chick­ens pri­mar­ily to stim­u­late their growth. But why did the banned sub­stance show up recently in eight of 12 sam­ples of “feather meal,” the ground-down plumage left­over from com­mer­cial poul­try production?

This was just one of the mys­ter­ies uncov­ered in a study con­ducted jointly by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and Arizona State University. The research, pub­lished last month in the jour­nal Environmental Science & Technology, uncov­ered a whole slew of other drugs in the feather meal that the sci­en­tists had not expected to find there.

Traces of the arsenic com­pound Roxarsone, for exam­ple, were present in almost all of the sam­ples. Farms admin­is­ter arsenic to chick­ens to turn their flesh just the right shade of pink that con­sumers find attrac­tive. Yet, in June 2011, the FDA gave Pfizer 30 days to dis­con­tinue sell­ing Roxarsone, a proven car­cino­gen. So why is it still show­ing up in our chickens?

Other sub­stances that the sci­en­tists found include aceta­minophen, the active ingre­di­ent in Tylenol, Benadryl, an anti­his­t­a­mine, even Prozac, an anti­de­pres­sant. Farms feed chick­ens these mood-altering drugs to reduce their anx­i­ety. Chickens are anx­ious because they are bred on over­crowded and filthy fac­tory farms. Stressed-out birds develop meat that is tough and unpalat­able, so they need to be sedated. Yet, chick­ens on tran­quil­iz­ers sleep all the time and do not eat enough. So they are given high doses of caf­feine (which was also found in the feather meal) to keep them awake at night to feed and fat­ten up.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.