American Meat Infused with Heavy Metals, Veterinary Medications, Agricultural Pesticides
May 1st, 2010Via: Alternet:
While the public has gotten used to microbes like E. coli and salmonella threatening the nation’s meat supply, and while food safety agencies make food-borne illness a high-profile priority, contamination of meat by heavy metals, veterinary drugs and pesticides has been slipping through the bureaucratic cracks.
Microbial contaminants can be killed by cooking, but chemical residues aren’t destroyed by heat. In fact, some of these residues break down into more dangerous substances when heated, according to the FSIS National Residue Program for Cattle, a recent report by the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General.
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“… The national residue program is not accomplishing its mission of monitoring the food supply for harmful residues,” the report says, noting that thresholds for many dangerous substances, like copper and dioxin, have yet to be established. “We also found that FSIS does not recall meat adulterated with harmful residues, even when it is aware that the meat has failed its laboratory tests.”
The routes by which veterinary drugs make it into human food trace a disturbing portrait of how large dairy farms operate. Sick dairy cows are given medications to help them recover, but if it appears an animal will die, it’s often sold to a slaughterhouse as quickly as possible, in time to kill it before it dies. That way, “[the dairy farmer] can recoup some of his investment in the animal,” according to the report.
In such cases, medications may be consumed along with the meat. Such drugs include Ivermectin (which can act as a neurotoxin in humans), Flunixin (which can damage kidneys), and penicillin (which can cause life-threatening allergic reactions in some people).
The meat from sick dairy cattle is low-grade, and is usually turned into burger and sold to the sorts of buyers who stretch their dollars furthest, like fast food chains and school lunch programs. But veterinary drugs are also finding their way into an upper echelon of meat: veal.
The milk produced by medicated dairy cows is barred from sale to human consumers — a sensible rule, given the dangers suggested above. Unfortunately, no law prevents this “waste milk” from being fed to veal calves, the meat of which sometimes tests positive for these drugs. As with sick dairy cow meat that tests positive for antibiotics, no measures are taken to recall such veal or penalize the slaughterhouses that produce it. One slaughterhouse, according to the report, amassed 211 violations in 2008 and was still considered by FSIS as a place where contamination “is not reasonably likely to occur.”
Research Credit: JH
