By Martha Rosenberg
ARE YOU EATING THESE HARMFUL CHEMICALS?
If you’ re like most people, you know little about the drugs food animals are given— Big Food likes it that way.
The breadth of livestock diseases and drugs routinely given to food animals could kill people’ s appetites, especially if the information were included on food labels or included in mainstream news reports.
For example, Merck & Co. drugs address poultry diseases like fowl pox, turkey coryza, bursal disease, coccidiosis, laryngotracheitis, hemorrhagic enteritis, avian encephalomyelitis, salmonella, E. coli and herpes. Yum.
Merck also sells drugs for diseases that pigs and cows contract like septicemia and Salmonella choleraesuis and Salmonella typhimurium and run of the mill pneumonia and diarrhea.
Aquaculture operations contaminate the environment with aluminium hydroxide, glucans, potassium aluminium sulphate or dimethyl sulphoxide. In unpublished interviews, FDA officials whose job includes toxin regulation, have said of dangerous food toxins,“ We wait [ to intervene ] until people drop dead.”
24 The Trial Lawyer