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cnn
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Chick-fil-A is reneging on its promise to “never give antibiotics.”
Citing dwindling supplies of chicken, Chick-fil-A will back down from its pledge to never serve chicken fed with antibiotics, and instead it will adopt a looser industry standard: “No antibiotics critical to human health.” Is.” Chick-fil-A first announced it would abandon antibiotics in 2014.
The change comes after Tyson, America’s largest poultry company, ended an eight-year pledge last summer to keep antibiotics out of its chicken. Like Chick-fil-A, Tyson said it will ensure that the chicken it produces will not be fed antibiotics that are vital to the treatment of humans – a standard recognized by the USDA and the World Health Organization.
As far as other meat processors, Pilgrim’s Pride says it uses some antibiotics, while Purdue still says it doesn’t.
Antibiotic use in food production has come under intense scrutiny in recent years as some bacterial infections in humans have become increasingly resistant to treatment as a result of more frequent exposure to the drugs.
But diseases in chicken coops can be difficult to control, as poultry farmers faced great difficulty when highly contagious avian flu devastated their flocks in the past few years, bringing the disease back to earth late last year. The prices of chicken and eggs increased before the arrival. That particular disease cannot be treated with antibiotics, but other diseases that can kill chickens respond to antibiotics.
In addition to the health of the chickens, antibiotics are especially important for promoting poultry growth – especially for commodities like large broiler chickens.
Chick-fil-A said in its statement that the company is committed to serving only white breast meat without any added hormones, artificial preservatives or fillers. He hopes to begin supplying chicken fortified with antibiotics this spring.
According to Tyson, about half of American poultry farmers use some form of antibiotics to help keep chickens healthy. In many poultry farms, animals are raised in crowded and unsanitary conditions and may be at risk for disease.
In WHO’s most recent publication on the “critical to human medicine” standard, the group said that “there remains clear evidence of adverse human health outcomes due to resistant organisms as a result of nonhuman use of antimicrobial drugs.” It also states that the types of drugs used to promote growth and health in animals “are often similar to, or closely related to, drugs used in human medicine.”
With the understanding that antibiotic treatments may at times be critical to meat production, WHO developed a set of risk assessments in 2007 aimed at preventing antibiotics important to humans from being used in animal production.
That 2007 publication noted that “an appropriate balance must be struck between animal health needs and human health considerations – however, human health is paramount compared to animal health.”
