Today, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future published a study in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives that provided further evidence of the risks associated with the use of arsenicals in animal agriculture. Just in case anyone still needed convincing (Ahem! FDA, Pfizer and industrial chicken magnates). The study, which involved analysis of chicken breast samples purchased at grocery stores in 10 cities across the US, revealed that chickens likely raised with arsenic-based drugs yield meat that has higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen that has also been associated with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive deficits and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Why would anyone feed arsenic to chickens?

While you and I might associate arsenic only with the plotlines of old who-done-it novels in which affluent elderly gentlemen are slowly poisoned by long-suffering caretakers or disgruntled relatives, its use by industrial chicken producers is anything but fiction. Back in the 1940s, producers started using arsenicals to promote growth, treat disease and improve meat pigmentation. The practice eventually became standard; according to industry estimates, by 2010, 88% of all chickens raised for human consumption in the US were given the arsenic-based drug roxarsone. (And – fun fact – we raise about 9 billion chickens for meat every year.)

Although pharmaceutical giant Pfizer voluntarily pulled roxarsone from the US market in 2011, it can still sell the drug abroad – and other than the sort of basic commitment to social responsibility that big players in the industrial livestock sector love to advertise yet incessantly avoid, there’s nothing stopping Pfizer from reintroducing roxarsone to the US market (i.e., the FDA hasn’t actually banned its use). Moreover, Pfizer still sells nitarsone, another arsenical drug similar to roxarsone.

What happens to the arsenic fed to chickens?

Turns out that when you feed arsenical drugs to livestock, the arsenic doesn’t just magically disappear. Instead, trace amounts of arsenic fed to chicken are excreted in their manure – and when hundreds of thousands of chickens are raised on a factory farm year after year, the arsenic can accumulate pretty quickly, eventually contaminating soil, groundwater and surface waters.

But not all the arsenic is excreted in manure; some portion also ends up in the poultry meat that US consumers eat every day. The newly published CLF study is the first to quantify concentrations of specific forms of arsenic (most notably inorganic arsenic) within chicken meat, and the first to directly compare arsenic concentrations in meat samples from birds likely raised with arsenical drugs to samples from chickens raised without these drugs.

The results

The researchers tested samples of three types of chicken breast: organic (which means the meat came from birds that were required to be raised without arsenical drugs), antibiotic-free (which means the birds were raised without antibiotics, but not necessarily without arsenicals) and conventional (which, given the high rate of arsenical use when the study was conducted between December 2010 and June 2011, means the birds likely received arsenical drugs). The researchers also contacted the various poultry producers to determine whether they had established policies to prohibit arsenical use, and divided the samples accordingly.

A few highlights from the analysis:

• Conventional samples had higher inorganic arsenic levels than antibiotic-free and organic samples.
• In meat samples containing roxarsone, levels of inorganic arsenic were four times higher than levels in organic chicken, and two to three times greater than the safety standard for inorganic arsenic in foods proposed in a 2011 FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine study. (Note that the FDA retracted this recommendation shortly afterward.)
• 70 percent of samples from conventional producers without policies prohibiting arsenical use had inorganic arsenic levels that exceeded the aforementioned FDA safety standard.
• The researchers had the foresight to preemptively reject any ridiculous “if-you-cook-chicken-to-the -recommended-temperature-arsenic-will-disappear” argument from industrial poultry apologists by cutting each sample of chicken in half, cooking one half and testing both the cooked and raw samples. Unsurprisingly, cooking didn’t eliminate the arsenic. But somewhat alarmingly for poultry consumers who prefer not to eat raw meat, cooked chicken samples had higher levels of inorganic arsenic than their uncooked counterparts.
• Using a model for cancer risk developed by the EPA, the researchers estimated that based on the levels of inorganic arsenic discovered in the study, industry-wide use of arsenical drugs could cause an average of 124 cancers per year.

Good science to shift bad policy?

The levels of inorganic arsenic discovered in chicken are cause for concern, especially since many of us are already exposed to the carcinogen through additional dietery and environmental paths (for instance, see Consumer Reports’ 2012 report about arsenic in rice). But unlike these other sources of exposure, which typically result from natural arsenic deposits, industry or residual contamination from the days of widespread arsenical pesticide use, as noted in the study, “arsenical poultry drugs are deliberately administered to animals intended for human consumption. Consequently, exposures resulting from use of these drugs are far more controllable than exposures from environmental sources.”

The authors of the study concluded their analysis in the reserved, impartial tone characteristic of practiced scientists, stating, “Our findings suggest that eliminating the use of arsenic-based drugs in food animal production could reduce the burden of arsenic-related disease in the US population.” Since I’m not writing for a peer-reviewed science journal, I’ll allow myself to be a little less diplomatic in my own summary: this study provides further evidence that continued use of arsenicals in food animal production poses an entirely unnecessary threat to public health. While the practice might boost the profits earned by poultry giants and the manufacturers who supply them with arsenical drugs, it’s imprudent and irresponsible. As such, the FDA has no legitimate justification for its ongoing failure to prohibit arsenicals from food animal production.

This post originally appeared on Ecocentric blog.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

The independent product testing organization Consumer Reports, which regularly tests and rates a raft of consumer products—from lawnmowers, to washing machines, to baby monitors, to cars—recently focused its meticulous consumer product testing methods on America’s turkey burgers, releasing the results of their new study of ground turkey samples from around the United States. The findings were simultaneously unappetizing and encouraging.

First, the bad news:

Consumer Reports found high levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on turkey meat that was raised conventionally—that is, with the routine use of antibiotics. Unfortunately, Consumer Reports’ findings for turkey are not outliers. The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) samples many more meat products than Consumer Reports and finds high rates of antibiotic-resistant pathogens on meat. Detecting these “superbugs” on meat is a sign that the resistant bacteria generated in conventional factory farms through careless use of antibiotics are leaving these facilities.

However, Consumer Reports’ analysis of turkey raised without unsafe uses of antibiotics also delivers some good news: our meat industry doesn’t have to be this way.

According to Consumer Reports, ground turkey labeled “no antibiotics,” “organic,” or “raised without antibiotics” was as likely to harbor bacteria as products without those claims; BUT—and this is an important but—the bacteria found on those products were less likely to be resistant:

“When we focused on antibiotic use, our analysis showed that bacteria on turkey labeled “no antibiotics” or “organic” were resistant to significantly fewer antibiotics than bacteria on conventional turkey. We also found much more resistance to classes of antibiotics approved for use in turkey production than to those not approved for such use.”

This is no surprise. As Consumer Reports notes, antibiotics aren’t allowed in turkeys labeled “organic,” “no antibiotics,” or “raised without antibiotics.” Sick birds may be treated, but they’re then sold to non­organic markets.

What this tells us is that just like in human medicine, when antibiotics are misused, we risk breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But when antibiotics are used appropriately, we are less likely to foster the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meat production. [You can hear more about the Consumer Reports investigation in this great NBC Nightly News segment.]

Antibiotic resistance is now a major public health problem. Drug-resistant infections are harder for doctors to treat, can lead to longer illnesses, more hospital stays, and even death when treatments fail.

Unfortunately, antibiotics are being misused and overused on a massive scale in our conventional meat industry. Today, four times the amount of antibiotics are used on the turkeys, chickens, pigs and cows that end up on our plates than on humans. Even worse, the vast majority of the use is not to treat animals when they get sick. Instead, antibiotics are fed routinely to these animals to speed up growth and prevent diseases associated with poor living conditions. This practice is a key culprit in the proliferation of bacteria resistant to the kinds of antibiotics we humans rely on when we get sick and that can’t easily be knocked out by them.

While catching any kind of foodborne bug is no fun, most people are able to handle a foodborne illness without needing treatment. But if the illness requires treatment, when the bacteria are resistant, it can escalate what could be an easily treatable condition into a serious health threat for that individual.

Meat is just one of the ways in which resistant superbugs can leave livestock feedlots and make us sick. Resistant bacteria can travel off the farm in air, water, soil, and on workers, and can easily share their resistance traits with other bacteria.

You can do your part to protect yourself and your family—and support farmers who are good stewards of our precious antibiotics—by looking for alternatives to conventional meat in your local grocery store.

Meats labeled USDA Organic, those which say “no antibiotics administered” and carry the USDA Process Verified seal, as well other labels which certify practices are your best options. If certified labels are not available, consider labels with producer claims of “no antibiotics administered”.

Just as importantly, speak up. Ask your supermarket butchers and store managers if the meat they’re selling comes from animals raised with the routine use of antibiotics and ask them to carry meat that was responsibly produced. The more they hear from their customers, the more responsibly produced alternatives will find their way to our meat aisles.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

As a result, the sad but unsurprising reality is that those who fight to protect their families and communities from the devastating public health, environmental and socioeconomic impacts of industrial livestock operations often lose. But sometimes they win. And every so often, they win a great, monumental victory, proving that despite the wealth and power of its proponents, the industrial food system is not above the law–and not beyond reform.

Just before Thanksgiving, a victory of this magnitude occurred in Jo Daviess County, Illinois. It happened quietly, receiving little national coverage by the mainstream news media, and largely overlooked by good food advocates distracted by the holiday shuffle. But we all should’ve been singing about this from the rooftops – and though it’s no longer breaking news, I’d be remiss if I didn’t climb up onto the virtual shingles of the internet to spread the word. The unprecedented win: a small group of concerned citizens called Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards (HOMES) successfully prevented industrial dairy magnate A. J. Bos from building what would have been the state’s largest dairy – despite the fact that construction of the facility had already been more than halfway completed.

The significance of this event was perhaps best articulated by Danielle Diamond, attorney for the Illinois Citizens for Clean Air & Water (ICCAW) and executive director of the Socially Responsible Agricultural Project (SRAProject), who said of the victory:

This is a true David and Goliath story. Never before in my work with communities trying to protect themselves from the devastating impacts of industrial animal factories have I seen a group of people successfully stop construction after groundbreaking. HOMES’ commitment to stand up for their rights against all odds and against one of the most powerful corporate agribusiness industries in the country will inspire others standing in their shoes.

Why this matters: An overview of industrial livestock operations and why they make terrible neighbors

We’ve written extensively about industrial livestock production on Ecocentric, and you can find more details about the issue on Sustainable Table, but here’s a quick summary:

Industrial livestock operations, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) or factory farms, are large-scale livestock facilities that confine hundreds (and in some cases, hundreds of thousands) of animals in cramped conditions without access to pasture. Despite the fact that these operations are known to damage the environment, threaten human health, degrade surrounding communities and compromise animal welfare, the US continues to rely on them to produce the vast majority of its meat, dairy and eggs.

This situation persists because subsidies, negative externalities and a variety of additional economic market failures enable industrial livestock operations to generate large profits for a handful of powerful agribusiness corporations controlled by individuals who don’t have to live next door.

People who do have to live next door suffer the harmful health effects of exposure to pollutants such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, VOCs, particulate matter and a host of pathogens. They witness the contamination of groundwater and surface waters and the degradation of the surrounding environment. They experience plummeting property values, declining local economies and the disintegration of community ties.

In fact, living near an industrial livestock operation is similar to exactly the same as living near an enormous cesspool (because, you might be horrified to note, these facilities often store animal waste in uncovered, multi-acre pits called manure lagoons). And nobody wants to live near a place like that. This is why rural communities have fought (and continue to fight) so hard to prevent industrial livestock operations from being constructed nearby.

The challenge facing these communities is particularly urgent because CAFOs are a bit like cockroaches or bedbugs: they tend to multiply quickly, and once they set up shop, it’s really tough to get rid of them. In fact, given the current pro-industry regulatory climate, even if a CAFO spills millions of gallons of waste or causes an outbreak of foodborne illness that sickens hundreds and prompts the recall of half a billion eggs due to egregious violations of basic sanitary standards, the facility won’t actually be shut down; in most cases, regulatory violations result in little more than a slap-on-the-wrist fine and a stern admonishment to do better next time.

The Traditions Dairy Saga

Residents of rural Illinois are all too familiar with the ills of industrial livestock production (see the distribution of facilities by county on this map). The state has a history of catering to agribusiness, making a concerted effort to attract industrial livestock producers by rolling out the welcome mat and rubberstamping CAFO permits.

Though the Illinois livestock sector has long been dominated by hog production, in 2007, California dairyman A. J. Bos switched up the species, filing a Notice of Intent to Construct Traditions Dairy, which was to consist of two 5,500-cow CAFOs located less than a mile from Nora, Illinois. Industrial livestock operations are never a good idea, but the Traditions plan was particularly ill-advised and irresponsible due to the karst bedrock underlying the site.

The high porosity of the karst would dramatically increase the likelihood that waste from the dairy would contaminate surface and groundwater (including drinking water resources). This risk was further increased by the fact that the CAFOs would collectively generate more than 200 million gallons of waste annually, which would be stored in several 14-acre manure lagoons, one of which was to be sited directly on top of a spring-fed creek leading into the Apple River.

Given the threat of groundwater contamination (the legitimacy of which was confirmed by expert testimony from the Illinois State Geological Survey), along with concerns about the facility’s potential adverse impacts on air quality, public health, tourism and the overall quality of life enjoyed by community members, the Jo Daviess County Board voted to reject Bos’ CAFO application in February 2008.

You’d think the story would end here, lending itself to a neat summary: Out-of-state megadairy tycoon makes irresponsible attempt to construct hazardous industrial facility; elected officials recognize the potential threat to human health and the environment, and, acting in accordance with public sentiment, vote to reject the construction permit; megadairy tycoon abandons reckless plan; citizens of Jo Daviess live happily ever after.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Jo Daviess residents were forced to spend the next five years struggling to protect their community from a nightmare industrial dairy backed by serious money and supported by the state’s pro-CAFO regulatory agencies. You can read the full story on the HOMES website, but here are the highlights:

In May 2008, the Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDOA) disregarded the county board’s decision, ignored the threat of groundwater contamination and exerted its authority to grant the CAFO construction permit. Four days later, HOMES filed a lawsuit against Bos and the IDOA to stop construction. But so confident was A. J. Bos in his ability to steamroll the CAFO through any legal or regulatory hurdles that he began construction despite the pending lawsuit and the fact that he’d yet to secure all permits necessary to complete the project. Then Bos spent an estimated $1.2 million purchasing 26,000 tons of corn silage (used as feed for dairy cows), which he piled up on a concrete slab at the construction site.

Long, convoluted, infuriating story short, a judge issued a temporary injunction in October 2008, forcing Bos to halt construction. But the temporary injunction didn’t hold the project off for long; in 2009, the trial court entered an order in favor of A.J. Bos denying HOMES’ request for a permanent injunction.

In the meantime, the uncovered silage began to ferment, creating an acidic leachate that seeped from the CAFO site, polluting nearby surface waters and likely groundwater. HOMES and other activists diligently monitored these illegal discharges and documented major water pollution events, the most notable of which caused a tributary to the Apple River to turn purple (seriously; see photos from HOMES).

Meanwhile, in response to a Clean Water Act Section 308 complaint made by HOMES and ICCAW, the US EPA demanded waste management information for the operation and mandated that Bos conduct a geophysical dye-tracing study to determine whether the facility’s waste storage system would cause contamination of the aquifer. Bos ignored this request, ultimately prompting the US Department of Justice to threaten federal enforcement for noncompliance with the US EPA investigation. But it wasn’t until the purple river incident that the Illinois Attorney General filed charges against the dairy, which, two years later, resulted in the settlement in which Bos finally agreed to abandon the CAFO plan and sell the land.

Hope and Indignation

It’s reprehensible that A. J. Bos would propose construction of 68 acres of manure storage – including four 14-acre open cesspools - within a community, and even more outrageous that he would choose to build the facility on fractured bedrock that all but guaranteed rapid contamination of the underlying aquifer. It’s preposterous that a regulatory agency would disregard this risk, dismiss a local government’s rejection of the proposal and issue a permit for construction of an industrial facility that posed a clear threat to public health and the environment.

It’s mind-boggling that Bos could disregard a US EPA mandate, and illegally discharge pollutants for years before he was forced to abandon the CAFO plan and clean up his mess. And it’s heartbreaking to know that the Traditions Dairy closure is so unusual; in most cases, when someone decides to construct an industrial livestock operation, it ends up being built despite community opposition and, in some instances, despite the facility’s incompliance with existing regulations.

Indeed, the fact that A. J. Bos felt confident enough to spend millions of dollars on the initial construction phases of his CAFO before resolving a legitimate legal challenge or securing all required permits demonstrates both the profound entrenchment of the industrial livestock system and the power of its proponents and allies. But what’s remarkable about the Traditions Dairy case is that despite the long odds, an extremely dedicated, well-organized group of community members was able to successfully defend the public interest.

Ultimately, the tireless efforts of HOMES and its supporters revealed that industrial livestock operations are not inevitable, and that the owners of these facilities are not above the law. So from here on the virtual rooftop, I shout my congratulations to HOMES for this monumental victory, and my gratitude to its members for providing inspiration to all those who will struggle to protect themselves against industrial livestock operations in the future.

This post originally appeared on Ecocentric.

When his Times colleague David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, Moss’s editors decided to bring Moss home and give him a safer beat: The processed food industry.

But in the terrorist-free terrain of Big Food’s boardrooms and Big Ag’s labs, Moss found himself once again reporting on body counts caused by a government agency’s failure to protect us. Only this time, the agents of death were salmonella and E. coli, not Al Qaeda. And the agencies in question were the FDA and USDA, not the Pentagon.

Of course, these deaths were the tragic result of negligence, incompetence, and greed, rather than an ideologically driven desire to murder innocent Americans. No food company would set out to fatally sicken anyone by intentionally contaminating its products with known toxins.

But Moss’s book raises the specter that some of them seem to be OK with engineering what is, essentially, a kind of chemical warfare. They’re well-acquainted with the studies Moss cites which suggest that salty, fatty, sugary foods reward the same pleasure sensors in our brains that drugs do. In fact, they don’t even bother to assemble focus groups to sample the latest snack foods and beverages anymore, because now they can bypass our subjective perceptions and just scan our brains directly to monitor how our taste buds are responding.

Moss reveals that food company executives–like the tobacco industry before them–have long been acutely aware of and worried about the health hazards presented by their products. And yet, despite those concerns about their culpability, processed food giants like Kraft, General Foods and Nestlé continue to launch an all-out assault on the American palate to convert us to “heavy users”–their term–of the salty, sugary, fatty processed foods that have proven so profitable for them and so harmful to us. They target especially vulnerable demographics: Impressionable children and low-income, low-information shoppers who lack the means and knowledge to make healthier food choices.

Their scientists and marketing mavens tinker endlessly with chemical formulas, and create branding and packaging that entice us to consume excessive quantities of the highly processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods and beverages that are slowly poisoning Americans on a scale that terrorists could only dream of.

And they’ve been aided and abetted in this campaign by the tobacco industry, which responded to growing scrutiny about the hazards of its sole product by snapping up processed food companies in a bid to expand its portfolio and its profits. The same sleazy, disingenuous strategies that tobacco executives once used to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking are trotted out once again by the usual suspects, aka the Merchants of Doubt, to deceive the public about the perils of processed foods.

But don’t look to the USDA to counter those tactics in any meaningful way. As Moss notes, the USDA has the impossible job of simultaneously encouraging more wholesome eating habits while promoting the interests of industrial agriculture.

Any doubts about which of those mandates comes first? The USDA oversees the promotion of its agricultural agenda from its massive headquarters in the heart of Washington, D.C. But the branch of the USDA tasked with ensuring the public’s health, The Center For Nutritional Policy and Promotion, is located across the river on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. To get there, Moss had to take the DC Metro, transfer to a bus, and then walk a third of a mile. And out of a total budget of some $146 billion, the center receives a pitiful $6.5 million dollars. Hardly enough to offset the astronomical sums of money the food industry spends to develop and market its junky convenience foods.

Moss spent several years combing through mountains of documents, including confidential memos, and conducted hundreds of interviews with industry insiders. He found a few disillusioned whistleblowers and a handful of individuals who genuinely wanted to provide consumers with more wholesome options. But their efforts to chip away at the horrendous quantities of salt, fats and sugars the industry relies on to mask the shortcomings of its cheap commodity crop ingredients invariably hit a deadend labeled “Wall Street.”

Campbell’s Soup, for instance, found that it could reduce the sodium content of some of its soups without sacrificing too much flavor if they added dried herbs to their recipes. But the herbs were deemed “too expensive.” And despite claims from all of these companies that they are committed to offering healthier products, the reality is that none of them wants to risk sacrificing market share–or, as they call it, “stomach share”–to their competitors. To cut back on salt, fat and sugar is, essentially, a form of disarmament. So, barring some sort of self-imposed or government-mandated unilateral disarmament, there’s not likely to be much improvement in the quality of processed foods anytime soon.

In his interviews with scientists, food company executives, and other food industry insiders, Moss found their reactions to the public health hazard they’ve helped to create ran the gamut from defiantly unrepentant to sincerely remorseful. He notes, too, that whether food company executives openly acknowledge the shortcomings of their nutritionally dubious foodstuffs or not, none of them actually eats or drinks their own company’s products.

Under the circumstances, Moss writes, we’d be well advised to “think of the grocery store as a battlefield, dotted with landmines itching to go off.” The Wall Street Journal‘s review of Moss’s book dismissed this statement as “unnecessary hyperbole,” a word they also used to dismiss the scientists’ claims that junk foods can be as addictive in their own way as cocaine.

But as Salt Sugar Fat shows, it’s not hyperbole; it’s just another inconvenient truth. In the new documentary A Place at the Table, another exposé of our screwed-up food chain from Participant Media, who brought us Food, Inc., the actor and longtime anti-hunger activist Jeff Bridges bemoans the collective failure of private enterprise and public policy to provide affordable wholesome foods to all Americans. Instead, we’ve got government-subsidized empty calories from commodity crops and a rapacious food industry that seems to regard children as fair game in their eternal quest for greater market share.

“If another country was doing this to our kids,” Bridges says, “we would be at war.” When you read Salt Sugar Fat, it’s hard not to conclude that we already are at war. After all, there’s a real body count.

When Moss was a war correspondent in the Middle East, he wrote an article outlining the rules of jihadi etiquette, which included the edicts that “you can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt,” and “you can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.” The food industry folks that Moss interviewed for Salt Sugar Fat didn’t offer any such clear-cut commandments about acceptable levels of collateral damage. And anyway, it’s not their fault if we fail to exercise the proverbial “personal responsibility” it requires to resist their strenuous efforts to tempt us to eat and drink ourselves sick. Besides, they’re just giving the public what it craves. And that, unlike salmonella and E. coli, is not by accident.

Writer Melanie Warner, whose new expose-on-the-world-of-processed-foods book, Pandora’s Lunchbox, is out this week, spent the past year and a half doing exactly that. In her quest to explore the murky and convoluted world of soybean oil, milk protein concentrates (a key ingredient in processed cheese), and petroleum-based artificial dyes, she spoke to food scientists, uncovered disturbing regulatory loopholes in food law, and learned just how little we know about many of the food products on supermarket shelves.

After reading Pandora’s Lunchbox, I sent Melanie some burning questions via e-mail.

The term “processed food” is ubiquitous these days. The food industry has attempted to co-opt it by claiming canned beans, baby carrots, and frozen vegetables are “processed foods.” Can you help explain why a Pop-Tart is years away from a “processed food” like hummus?

You have to ask yourself, could I make a Pop-Tart or Hot Pocket at home, with all those same ingredients listed on the package? I don’t know anyone who could do that in their home kitchen. How would you even go about procuring distilled monoglycerides and BHT, for instance? These are highly processed food products loaded up with sugar and sodium, subjected to abusive processing conditions, and assembled with a litany of additives, many of which nobody ever consumed prior to a hundred years ago.

Yet it is possible to make your own black beans at home by soaking and then cooking them. You could even attempt a rudimentary canning operation to preserve them. You can also make hummus by grinding chickpeas with a few other ingredients like lemon juice. The same goes for frozen vegetables and even baby carrots, though homemade baby carrots wouldn’t look as pretty as the ones you buy at the story. The “processing” these foods go through is minimal and not disfiguring. The end result still looks like a food that once grew on a farm.

Many people are put at ease when government agencies and the food industry state that controversial substances are “Generally Recognized as Safe.” Why is this not as comforting as it sounds?

The idea of something “generally recognized as safe” seems so reassuring, but the more you know about the U.S. system of food ingredient regulation the less cause there is for comfort.

For starters, the GRAS process, as it’s known, is one of self-regulation. If a food ingredient company wants to introduce a new additive, they – not the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) – hire some experts or a consulting firm to make the determination about whether this new ingredient is safe. Sometimes you’ll hear that company X has been awarded “GRAS status” for its new ingredient, but the FDA doesn’t award anything. The agency merely has the option to review what companies tell them.

Except when they don’t. In a glaring regulatory loophole that dates back to 1958, the GRAS system also happens to be voluntary. It’s perfectly legal for companies to keep the FDA in the dark about new additives, and consequently there are some 1,000 ingredients the FDA has no knowledge of whatsoever, according to an estimate done by the Pew Research Center.

And the “testing” most additives go through isn’t exactly rigorous. While older additives have been subjected to actual studies, most newer ones haven’t. According to Pew, of the estimated 5,000 additives going directly into our food, less than 50 percent have been the subject of toxicology testing on animals. And hardly any go through testing for the way we actually consume food additives, which is in combination with many ingredients at once.

Although the FDA seeks to reassure us they are keeping a close watch over our food, the job of rigorously regulating thousands of food additives is simply too big for an underfunded agency. BHA, a “probable carcinogen” according to the Department of Health and Human Services, is still allowed in food.

The food industry has often reacted to nutritional concerns by fortifying nutrients into their products. What did you glean from your research about the way these synthetic vitamins are created, and how are they different from the nutrients intrinsically found in foods?

Many of the vitamins we consume, whether in supplements or a box of cereal, come from China. They are produced in enormous factories scattered throughout the eastern half of the country, and these factories account for at least half of all global vitamin production.

It’s often assumed that vitamin C comes from maybe an orange or vitamin A from a carrot, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Vitamin C starts with a corn ingredient and then undergoes a complex, multi-step bacterial and chemical process. Vitamin A comes from acetylene gas, a chemical derived from petroleum refining. And vitamin D, most surprisingly, starts with sheep grease. Ships loaded up with sheep wool regularly depart from Australian ports and make their way to China.

The most obvious way a nutrient made in Shenyang differs from one engineered by Mother Nature is that nature’s vitamins always come packaged with all sorts of other helpful stuff, like fiber, additional nutrients and antioxidants. This synergy may be the key to vitamins really helping us stay healthy. They may need other components to help them work most effectively.

You spoke to many food scientists and visited many processing plants. What is one anecdote or moment that stands out to you most during the course of your research?

I was struck by how many of the people I talked to in the food industry don’t actually eat much of what their industry produces. One flavorist told me she eats at Subway only as a last resort, when she’s traveling and there’s nothing else around. Lots of people told me they don’t buy their kids sugary drinks and that they like to cook and shop at farmer’s markets to get the freshest food possible.

When I asked them about the dichotomy between their eating habits and those of the people who regularly consume their products, their response was either: 1) “we’re just giving people what they want; nobody is forcing anyone to eat anything” or 2) it’s unrealistic to think that everyone can eat fresh foods.

To me, number one seems a bit disingenuous because of the massive volume of marketing and advertising the industry undertakes and number two perpetuates a financially convenient cynicism. Nothing is going to change if we’ve already concluded that Americans really don’t want healthy, fresh, high quality food.

You investigated how soybean oil is made. Can you explain why calling it “natural” is a complete misnomer?

It’s not easy getting mass quantities of edible oil from soybeans, which are small, brittle beans containing less than 20 percent oil. First you have to drench them with hexane, a toxic chemical solvent that is known to cause nerve damage in humans. The hexane percolates through the soybeans several times and is then removed from the oil (any residues that remain are small.) After that you have to treat the oil with sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid, then bleach it with a filter, and deodorize it under heat and an intense vacuum. Then often the oil is hydrogenated or interesterified, allowing it to be more stable for frying or other high-heat conditions. Calling any of this “natural” is a farce.

Not to mention the fact that 93 percent of all soybeans are genetically modified, a technology most people think doesn’t deserve to go anywhere near the word “natural.”

On the topic of dairy, milk protein concentrates are a rather controversial ingredient many people are unaware of. What does the inclusion of milk protein concentrate in a food product say about it?

It says that the manufacturer is trying to cut corners and save money, which is understandable since all large publicly traded corporations are constantly under enormous pressure to cut costs. Milk protein concentrate can help replace the cheese that goes into boxed macaroni and cheese or the milk in processed cheese slices. If you see milk protein concentrate in your Greek yogurt it means the manufacturer has skipped the expensive step of straining the yogurt and has added milk protein concentrate, or MPC, to boost the protein levels (they’ve probably also added in some type of starch to thicken the yogurt). As a powder, MPC is much more durable and easier to work with than milk or cheese.

MPC is made by a process of ultrafiltration and microfiltration, which separates milk according to its different molecular fractions. It’s just one product that comes from the industrial disassembly of milk. You can also get whey protein concentrate and caseinate. Milk, regardless of what you think of its nutritional merits, is a real food. MPC is not.

What is your answer to those who think “better-for-you” processed foods (such as fiber-enhanced protein bars and Omega-3 fortified cookies) are “a baby step” towards better health for Americans?

One word: Snackwells. In the early 90s, at the zenith of low-fat mania, Kraft introduced these “healthier” cookies. They had only 55 calories per cookie and much of the fat had been taken out (and replaced by emulsifiers, starches and gums). Eager for a hall pass on guilt, cookie lovers went nuts, buying up multiple packages and probably eating more than they would have otherwise, erasing any calorie reduction advantage. It’s a case that illustrates how “healthier” processed foods often don’t promote health; they just end up confusing people. Is a fiber-enhanced protein bar better than a regular protein bar with heavy processed ingredients and almost no intrinsic nutrition? Only if your standards for “better” are really low.

We’re better off getting fiber from eating an apple or having some rice and beans. This way, we get other nutrition our bodies need and will feel like we’ve actually eaten something filling. All these refurbished, less bad products only keep us tethered to a merry-go-round of inferior choices. The answer is making real food the foundation of our diets.

As Jayaraman explains, this story is all too typical. Because most restaurant workers do not receive paid sick days, they are coming to work when they should stay home. Remember all the times that as a full-time salaried worker, you stayed home with a cold, or to take care of a sick child, or just needed a “mental health day?” It’s a perk many of us take for granted, but for workers who handle our food, in jobs where spreading germs is among the most risky, calling in sick not even an option.

That’s in large part thanks to the massive lobbying machine, the National Restaurant Association (aka the other NRA). In 2012 alone, the group (designated as a “heavy hitter” by the Center for Responsive Politics, among the 140 biggest donors since 1990) spent more than $2.7 million lobbying at the federal level, and donated more than a million dollars to federal candidates. (State restaurant associations are also very powerful.) The NRA also benefits nicely from the revolving door syndrome: Last year, 31 out of 40 NRA lobbyists previously held government jobs. Among the top issues on NRA’s agenda? Tips and sick leave.

This missive posted by the NRA last month and entitled, “Wage, sick leave, environmental issues top state agendas” explains the group’s anti-worker focus at the local level. The NRA whines about the how Philadelphia’s city council is sure to re-introduce legislation on paid sick leave that would so onerous that:

All employees would accrue one hour of sick time for every 40 hours worked and could earn up to 56 hours in a calendar year. Furthermore, the paid sick leave could be used for anything from being physically sick to caring for a sick family member or friend, or a doctor’s appointment.

The horror. How many NRA and restaurant industry executives enjoy these very privileges, or better? Locally, worker rights groups are gaining some traction, with numerous states and cities enacting paid sick leave bills. However, the NRA is also striking back where ever they can. According to this PR Watch storyfrom 2011, the NRA teamed up with the notorious right-wing lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to pass a state-wide law in Wisconsin to override a local referendum to require paid sick days that had passed in Milwaukee in 2008 with more than 70 percent of the popular vote, democracy be damned. Also helping ALEC lead the charge on this issue was YUM! Brands, which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. As PR Watch noted: “The effect of the repeal will be more sick workers at work, making others ill, in order to save or increase profits by corporations.”

This is exactly what the research shows. Results from this 2011 study of food workers (conducted in part by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) were not pretty: Almost 12% (of 500 surveyed) worked while suffering vomiting or diarrhea on two or more shifts. (Previous studies showed only five percent of workers.) Factors associated with working while vomiting or diarrhea included high volume of meals served and lack of policies requiring workers to report illness to managers. For those of us thinking we are immune if we don’t eat at fast food outlets or chains, it hardly mattered, as independent restaurants were also at risk. The researchers conclude that paid sick days could help. Obviously.

Yet in response to this study, the NRA told CNN: “There is no greater priority for the restaurant industry than food safety.” Really? Then stop lobbying against paid sick leave and start protecting your customers, even if you don’t care about the workers.

A survey conducted by the Restaurant Opportunities Center (co-founded by Jayaraman) found that an incredible 63% of restaurant workers reported cooking and serving food while sick. Perhaps less surprisingly, 87.7% of restaurant workers reported not having paid sick days.

In her recent article for CNN, author Jayaraman explained how the current flu season puts more workers and customers alike at risk. She also stressed that those of us fighting for better food safety laws should be paying just as much attention to worker rights:

If we don’t pay food industry workers decent wages and ensure they receive paid sick days, then no matter how much the FDA regulates the boiling temperature for processing cheese, restaurant workers will keep sneezing on our dinner and food-borne contamination and illness will continue to be a problem.

More than half of all reported U.S. foodborne disease outbreaks occur in restaurant settings. While outbreaks have various origins, according to the CDC, about 50% of all outbreaks of food-related illness are caused by the highly infectious norovirus, the leading cause of illness from contaminated food. No wonder the CDC recommends against preparing food when sick:

If you work with food when you have norovirus illness, you can spread the virus to others. You can easily contaminate food and drinks that you touch. People who consume the food or drinks can get norovirus and become sick. This can cause an outbreak.

That’s why we need better laws to help workers be able to afford to do the right thing to protect restaurant patrons. Not to mention that food outbreaks are costly to society at large. As Jayaraman puts it: “If we pay restaurant workers a living wage and ensure they can stay home when they’re sick, that means fewer taxpayer dollars on public health emergencies and fewer stomach aches for diners as well.”

Everyone wins, right NRA? Please support the campaign for paid sick days and check out the book, Behind the Kitchen Door. You can also register for this upcoming pubic health law webinar on the need for paid sick days, and current campaigns and legal issues.

Originally published on Appetite for Profit

As the proverb goes, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Unfortunately, new data released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week shows that the livestock industry continues to move in the wrong direction on antibiotic use—digging all of us into a deeper “hole” when it comes to the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance.

The data shows continued very high levels of antibiotic sales for meat and poultry production, with a steady uptick in overall antibiotics use in the livestock sector over the last decade, culminating in record high sales in 2011.

Kudos to our colleagues at Pew for putting together the great graphic showing the alarming trend (above).

The vast majority of all those antibiotics sold for use in livestock aren’t being given to chickens, pigs and cows that are sick. Instead, they are being mixed in with food and water and fed to food animals routinely to promote faster growth and prevent disease in crowded, stressful, and unsanitary conditions—essentially as a substitute for better management practices.

These conditions create the perfect environment for those bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics to multiply and thrive, creating more and more antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. In fact, you really could not design a better system for guaranteeing the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Superbugs can’t be knocked out with the usual medicines. If a child catches one of these, a simple ear infection could put her in the hospital – or worse. A broad coalition of prominent medical and public health groups have warned that the “overuse and misuse of important antibiotics in food animals must end, in order to protect human health.”

Unfortunately, other new data published the same day shows increases in antibiotic-resistance among bacteria on retail meat. Detecting superbugs on meat is a sign that the superbugs generated on factory farms through careless use of antibiotics are leaving these facilities.

Here’s Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, author of The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), legislation aimed at curbing the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture, on these findings:

“We are standing on the brink of a public health catastrophe. The threat of antibiotic-resistant disease is real, it is growing and those most at risk are our seniors and children. We can help stop this threat by drastically reducing the overuse of antibiotics in our food supply, and Congress should act swiftly to do so today.”

But while these pathogens can and do travel on meat, meat is just one of the ways they can enter our environment. Resistant bugs can travel out from feedlots through livestock and meat processing workers who come into contact with contaminated animals or meat, through water, soil, and air that comes into contact with contaminated animal waste, and through bacteria sharing resistance traits/genes with one another. Nonpathogenic bacteria can even share these traits with pathogenic bacteria.

This all can lead to antibiotic resistant capabilities being spread far and wide and ending up in the bacteria on a doorknob or on a piece of unwashed fruit or in a hospital where they can result in really severe illnesses.

The bottom line is that we when get sick, we want medicines that work. While many things contribute to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, including inappropriate uses of antibiotics in human medicine, the scale of misuse and overuse of antibiotics in the livestock industry is so large it simply dwarfs all other uses of antibiotics. In order to address the growing crisis of drug-resistant infections, we must take steps to reduce the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

This year, Congress will be an important battleground in this effort.

The Animal Drug User Fee Act (ADUFA) is up for renewal, providing an opportunity to win new antibiotic use reporting requirements—reforms that are critical because the public is currently in the dark about drug use trends and the prevalence of high risk practices. Even something as basic as which animals species are being treated with which drugs is not currently reported. New federal requirements for antibiotic use reporting and disclosure will allow us to better understand where the antibiotics are being used, for what purposes, and whether we are making progress on reducing antibiotics reliance on the part of livestock producers.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

For an overview of the 2012 Ag Gag saga, refer to FIC’s info page.

FIC collaborates with many coalition groups who oppose the legislation, which typically criminalize the individuals who expose wrongdoing rather than the perpetrators of it! Wyoming’s bill – which was introduced mere weeks after undercover video footage revealed inhumane handling of pigs at a Tyson Foods supplier in the state – threatens agriculture whistleblowers with jail time and a fine if they use a recording device on the facility’s premises.

Many similar bills introduced last year that explicitly banned the act of video recording at agricultural operations without consent failed to pass, due to free speech concerns. Others like the one in Iowa (which did pass last year, to our dismay) kept out language involving video, yet included problematic provisions that still enable a culture of silence behind factory farm doors. FIC Director Amanda Hitt authored an op-ed in Iowa’s Cedar Rapids Gazette explaining why its Ag Gag bill is bad for transparency and public health. She also wrote a piece that appeared in Utah’s Salt Lake Tribune calling out that state’s bill (before it, too, sadly became law), which forbids media recording at food facilities but also includes additional provisions to silence would-be whistleblowers.

One such provision is now also included in the Nebraska bill, penalizing workers who gain access to farm facilities by false pretenses or with the broadly defined “intent to disrupt the normal operations” – clearly directed at individuals who utilize video to expose abuse. It would have a chilling effect on industry whistleblowers, even established long-term employees, who witness serious violations and wish to speak up. The bill also requires animal abuse reports to be filed within 12 hours, a provision similar to New Hampshire’s proposed legislation requiring whistleblowers to report animal abuse and turn over videotapes and other documentation within 24 hours or face prosecution.

Why are these provisions problematic? There are a few key reasons, but Big Ag doesn’t choose to recognize them. A blog by the Animal Agriculture Alliance defending these “Farm Protection” bills (as the industry prefers to call them) suggests that if organizations (like the Humane Society of the United States, or HSUS, and Mercy for Animals) who have carried out undercover investigations “truly cared about animal welfare, then they wouldn’t wait one second to report a valid issue to the proper authorities.” These organizations, the commentator argues, would rather let their cameras roll for days or weeks, trading away law enforcement’s ability to intervene early in cases of animal cruelty to create lengthy “propaganda” pieces.

This cynical view, however, ignores the important role that long-form undercover investigations play in combating animal cruelty and the common experience of whistleblowers within the food industry and beyond. Undercover video:

1. Motivates the public to take action
2. Provides a larger body of evidence for law enforcement, and
3. Protects the whistleblower

Preventing all of the above, mandatory reporting laws are simply wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing.

Let’s break these reasons down. First, longer-form investigative pieces compel the public to place direct pressure on violators to take action to prevent animal abuse. Case in point: late USDA veterinarian Dean Wyatt consistently raised concerns of humane handling violations at two processing plants, but his complaints weren’t treated seriously by the government until undercover footage taken by HSUS at the plants was released, sparking public outrage and vindicating him. By then, however, he had been transferred, demoted, and stigmatized for doing his job. Wyatt’s case is one of many showing the routine practice of whistleblower retaliation that makes documenting wrongdoing via video recordings essential.

Second, documenting longer-form investigations provides law enforcement with a larger body of evidence to facilitate prosecution than a report of a single isolated incident. And law enforcement apparently needs all the help and encouragement it can get, as reports of animal cruelty rarely result in prosecution and conviction. According to a report issued by the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research, of the 1,369 animal cruelty cases brought in that state between 2004 and 2007, only 182 resulted in conviction. In most cases, the prosecutor decided not to prosecute.

Lastly, and perhaps most important, mandatory reporting laws like those proposed in Nebraska and New Hampshire are intended to, and will in fact, make performing and documenting these valuable longer-form investigations impossible. That’s because, absent meaningful whistleblower protections for the workers required to report violations, which these bills don’t provide, mandatory reporting requirements will make it easy for the company to isolate those who speak up and retaliate against them. If workers are forced to come forward with such evidence in a matter of hours, it eliminates the possibility of them working with outside organizations to both shield their identity and publicize the wrongdoing correctly.

In its 35 years of service, the Government Accountability Project has seen the scenario of corporations smearing the messenger play out too many times to count. FIC Counsel Jeff Gulley states:

Once an employer learns that one of its employees has reported a violation, whether through a public records request or a request for more information by the investigating agency, its knee-jerk reaction is often to immediately isolate or terminate the employee to prevent any further reports. Rarely is an employer’s first response to help law enforcement and take steps to address the underlying misconduct, particularly where the misconduct is profitable. Thus in addition to placing an unfair burden on the worker that witnesses animal abuse, these laws will in fact make it more difficult to uncover and prosecute animal cruelty.

To effectively protect the well being of the animals and the workers, such laws must at minimum include best-practice whistleblower protections. Without rights against retaliation when they disclose inhumane handling and other violations, would-be truth-tellers in the meat and poultry industry have no incentive to follow mandatory reporting laws. Requiring employees to report abuse right away is simply a way for the industry to weed out the “snitches” and prevent the acts of abuse, etc. from becoming public information.

As Bruce Friedrich of Farm Sanctuary put it in the Huffington Post … “New Laws, Same Effect.” Ag Gag bills, in all their forms, strictly aim to suppress whistleblowers. Knowing this, FIC has been working to counter the industry’s misleading arguments and reveal the importance of empowering honest insiders, not gagging them.

This post originally appeared on the Food Integrity Campaign website.

This is a welcome departure for an agency better known for paralysis than prevention. Perhaps this bold New Year’s announcement means the FDA is kicking off a new focus on shielding Americans from harm. Or perhaps the agency will simply fall back into its familiar pattern of delay.

For as welcome as the new food safety programs are, the FDA is still plagued with problems. It moves at a glacial pace in the face of pressing health hazards, like its three-decade-long refusal to act on its own findings that the use of antibiotics in livestock feed threatens human health. It takes a “see no evil” approach to detecting toxins in food and consumer products, like its habit of testing only 0.00002 percent of fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues. And it fails to follow consistent or transparent guidelines for determining what is safe, like its decision to set much weaker standards for oil contamination in seafood after the BP disaster than it did after the Exxon Valdez spill.

These are chronic and persistent challenges, yet the agency includes many talented professionals dedicated to keeping Americans safe. These staffers could help steer the agency toward a greater emphasis on precaution, independent science, and public accountability.

Meanwhile, some outside pressure may quicken the pace of change. Traditionally the agency has not received the kind of public scrutiny the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior, and other agencies have. Then in 2011, NRDC filed the first-ever lawsuit urging the FDA to address the misuse of antibiotics in livestock feed. A year later, a federal court ordered the agency to finally act on this known health hazard. With that case and several other legal actions, NRDC has put the FDA on notice that we are watching the agency closely and will hold it accountable as necessary.

It’s time to fix the FDA. If the agency addresses the following three threats to public health in 2013, we will know the FDA is serious about ending its paralysis and protecting the American people.

1.  End the Misuse of Antibiotics in Industrial Livestock
Eighty percent of all the antibiotics sold in America are used in livestock, not humans. This practice causes bacteria resistant to antibiotics, or “superbugs,” to thrive. These superbugs don’t stay on the farm. They can spread to humans and can lead to infections that are difficult or impossible to treat. Back in 1977, the FDA concluded that feeding antibiotics to farm animals was a threat to human health, and yet it did next to nothing to stop it over the next three decades. NRDC helped break the logjam: we took the FDA to court and won—twice. FDA has appealed the decisions and has proposed voluntary guidelines that leave action up to industry. The Court of Appeals will decide the issue, but the FDA shouldn’t need outside prodding to step forward and take decisive and meaningful action on this serious public health issue that is making essential medicines less effective. It should take binding action to stop the practice of feeding animals antibiotics at low levels day after day that kills only the weakest germs, leaving behind only the ones that are hardest to kill.

2. Stop the Use of Triclosan
Triclosan is a chemical additive in antibacterial soaps. Back in 1978, the FDA was considering banning triclosan from soaps because it was no more effective at fighting germs than traditional soap, and it was linked to problems with the brain, liver, and spleen. And yet the agency did nothing to limit its use. Over 30 years later, more science has emerged that triclosan interferes with hormones essential for development of the brain and reproductive systems. It has become so widespread that has been found in 75 percent of Americans over the age of six. The agency says that in light of safety concern, it was reviewing all available evidence and would share its triclosan findings in the winter of 2012. The year ended with no new findings from FDA. This was after it missed its summer of 2011 deadline. 2013 must be the year the agency issues its new findings—more than three decades after it released its original findings. But that is not enough. It must act on those findings and ban the use of this ineffective and hazardous additive in consumer products.

3. Protect Against Chemical Contamination of Food
The FDA’s new food safety programs begin to address the bacterial contamination in food. But that is not the only threat to America’s food supply: chemicals from pesticides and food additives also pose a significant risk to people’s hormone function, reproductive health, and brain development. The FDA has consistently failed to shield Americans from these harms. Right now, for instance, it only tests for illegal pesticides on about half a dozen bananas a year. Yet even with its limited testing, the FDA routinely finds unacceptable levels of pesticide residues on food, suggesting people are being exposed to toxic chemicals on produce. People are also exposed to steady doses of BPA—a chemical added to canned foods and other containers. BPA alters the development of the brain, prostate, and breast tissue. For the past five years, the FDA has been reviewing the safety of BPA in the food supply. Previous safety assessments have been summarily dismissed by outside scientific experts, and the agency was sent back to the drawing board. Perhaps in 2013, the FDA will finally release a scientifically robust assessment of BPA in food packaging. Meantime, it should also dramatically expand its testing programs for other known chemical hazards in the food we eat and hold companies accountable when they violate standards.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

He’s the author of the new book, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, and he recently came on our show, The Big Picture, to ring the alarm bell.

“Up to sixty million Americans get the flu every year,” he said before asking, “What if it turned deadly?”

The question wasn’t exactly rhetorical.

We do know that the flu is already deadly. Hundreds, sometime thousands, of Americans do die every year from the regular seasonal flu, which according to the Center for Disease Control has a mortality rate of about two-tenths of one percent.

A particularly severe and infectious form of influenza struck the world in 1918 infecting a third of the global population and killing as many as 100 million people. In the United States, that flu took the lives of more than a half-million Americans. Unlike the average seasonal flu that we’re confronting today with a mortality rate of .2%, the 1918 strand of influenza had a mortality rate of 2.5%. It was the worst plague in history.

But what if a strand of influenza swept across the nation that was twenty-five times deadlier than the 1918 strand? What if we were dealing with a flu pandemic that had a 60% mortality rate?

Here’s the frightening news: We already are.

An extremely deadly and contagious form of bird flu, H5N1, has already infected people in several countries including densely populated China and Indonesia, as well as Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, among others.

Just in 2012, known cases of H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia killed 90% of those infected. In China, 65% died. In Indonesia, the mortality rate was 83%. And in Laos and Nigeria, the mortality rate was 100% – every single person who got it, died.

If the 60 million Americans who get the flu every year suddenly got this particular strand of the flu, H5N1, then upwards of 40 million Americans would die. It would be a disaster on a scale never before seen in this nation other than, possibly, how Europeans wiped out Native Americans when they first brought the flu from Europe. And if it spread around the rest of the world, it would make the Black Plague of the 14th century look like the common cold.

Dr. Greger warned: “It’s like crossing one of the deadliest known human diseases, Ebola, with one of the most contagious known diseases, influenza.” He added that the single factor that was most likely to cause this is factory farming.

We should be doing everything we possibly can to defend against this apocalyptic pandemic. Yet, each day we as a nation continue factory farming, we’re tempting fate.

That’s because the only thing stopping the H5N1 influenza from killing billions around the planet is the H5N1 flu itself. Only about 600 people have been infected so far by this flu, simply because it hasn’t yet mutated to a form that can more easily infect humans.

As Dr. Greger said, “Right now, H5N1 is good at infecting the viral receptors that coat the trachea or windpipe of birds. It needs to mutate to better attach to human receptors.” He continued, “But there’s evidence that there is a strand in Indonesia and Egypt acquiring those mutations.”

Jamming birds together in factory farming slaughterhouses, beak to beak, and pumping them up with antibiotics promotes these mutations. Now that local small, family farms and local-supermarket butchers have been replaced by giant transnational slaughterhouses, we’ve seen a radical and rapid increase in mutant strains of the flu, along with other diseases that come from factory farms like the newly-mutated and now deadly forms of E. Coli and Salmonella.

“We’ve domesticated bird for thousands of years,” Dr. Greger noted. “It’s really just been in the last few years where we’ve seen this unprecedented emergence of these highly pathogenic strains, which have killed hundreds of billions of birds.”

Factory farms, according to Dr. Greger, are the, “perfect storm environments for the emergence and spread of these super-strains of influenza.”

Other consequences of factory farming are well known. Our national diet now has more meat it in it than ever before, thus accelerating heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other illnesses that are responsible for increasing healthcare costs.

Factory farms requires enormous food and water. And, according to a report by the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions are the direct or indirect result of giant factory farms raising cattle, pigs, and poultry.

In other words, factory farming is hurtling our planet toward catastrophic climate change.

But so far, these reasons haven’t been strong enough to really motivate us to change. Americans and policymakers haven’t been ready to move away from the factory farm model to bring back local farming and reform our diet by eating fewer dead animals.

But, if nothing else, the fear of a worldwide pandemic that kills more than half the human race should motivate us to change how we farm and how we eat.

Let’s hope. Because whatever joy we as a nation get out of eating chicken wings will be far outweighed by the catastrophe of watching millions of our fellow humans die.

To save the human race, we need to end factory farming now.

This article was first published on Truthout.

Image credit to Shutterstock.