97 percent of raw chicken is contaminated, but health officials still aggressively target raw milk

Thursday, January 02, 2014 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: chicken meat, food contamination, raw milk

(NaturalNews) While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to waste millions of taxpayer dollars every year persecuting raw milk farmers who produce a living and highly-nutritious whole food, the factory farm industry is busy getting away with stocking grocery store shelves with a potentially-deadly food product that a recent Consumer Reports investigation found is contaminated up to 97 percent of the time.

That product is raw chicken meat, and a sampling of more than 300 breasts, thighs and wings purchased at grocery stores all across the country found that virtually all of them are silently teeming with Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli and a host of other contaminants. According to Consumer Reports, tests conducted on the chicken revealed the presence of multiple bacteria strains responsible for causing bloody diarrhea, pneumonia, vomiting, stomach cramps and blood and urinary tract infections, among other illnesses.

"We bought 316 chicken breasts from major national grocery chains, big-box stores, and regional markets in 26 states, and tested them for six bacteria," explains the report. "They were salmonella, campylobacter, and staphylococcus aureus, which are some of the most common bacterial causes of food poisoning; E. coli and enterococcus, which are typical measures of fecal contamination, and klebsiella pneumoniae, a bug that's naturally present in our stomach but that can cause infections such as pneumonia."

Included in the tests was chicken meat sold by Tyson, Pilgrim's, Sanderson Farms and Perdue, as well as a handful of other "non-major" brands. Researchers also looked at meat labeled as coming from chickens not fed antibiotics, which is supposed to indicate a higher quality meat product. And yet, despite each of these labeling distinctions, chicken meat from every category tested positive for all the contaminants evaluated.

"Every one of the four major brands we tested contained worrisome amounts of bacteria, even the chicken breasts labeled 'no antibiotics' or 'organic,'" warns the report, noting that many of the samples contained antibiotic-resistant bacteria. "About half of our samples (49.7 percent) tested positive for at least one multidrug-resistant bacterium, and 11.5 percent carried two or more types of multidrug-resistant bacteria."

CDC admits raw chicken is leading cause of death, but government still focuses its attention on raw milk

These harrowing results communicate the vital importance of thoroughly cooking all conventional chicken meat before consumption. But even more telling is the fact that, despite the obvious dangers of factory-farmed chicken meat, the nation's regulatory bodies seem little concerned about this very serious issue, leaving the public to basically fend for itself.

"[M]ore deaths were attributed to poultry than to any other commodity," admits a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on outbreaks cited by Consumer Reports.

And yet the CDC continues to aggressively denounce raw milk consumption, relying on the FDA as its enforcement arm to effectively prohibit most Americans from accessing it. This is despite the fact that raw milk is orders of magnitude safer than conventional chicken meat, lunch meat, vegetables and a host of other FDA-endorsed food products currently on the market today.

Even worse is the fact that the FDA still refuses to enact an enforceable ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Though the science is clear that feeding healthy farm animals antibiotics is the leading cause of antibiotic resistance today, the FDA is nowhere to be found in taking legitimate protective action in the interest of public health against this destructive practice.

To access the full Consumer Reports paper on raw chicken meat, visit:
http://www.consumerreports.org.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.consumerreports.org

http://www.krmg.com

http://science.naturalnews.com