Your eating this? By: Michelle Maga

Factory Farming In the last few decades, consolidation of food production has concentrated power in the hands of fewer and fewer corporations. Many of today's farms are actually large industrial facilities, not the green pastures and red barns that most people imagine.

These consolidated operations are able to produce food in high volume but have little to no regard for the environment, animal welfare, or food safety. In order to maximize profits, factory farms often put the health of consumers and rural communities at risk.

Factory farming Approximately 10 billion animals are raised and killed in the US annually. Nearly all of them are raised on factory farms under inhumane conditions. These industrial farms are also dangerous for their workers, pollute surrounding communities, are unsafe to our food system and contribute significantly to global warming. The government calls these facilities Concentrated (or Confined) Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

The problem of this situation is that these multi million dollar companies have these small farmers in their pockets. They need to invest into these safety features for these chickens. Buying into this business alone is $500 000, plus all the safety upgrades that are needed. The average farmer that is in contract with companies make a profit of around $18 000 per year.

Your “solution” Low doses of antibiotics are administered regularly to animals in a preemptive move to ward off the diseases bred by unnatural, unsanitary conditions. In addition to preventive medicines, animals are fed hormones and antibiotics to promote faster growth.

Negative factor These antibiotics that are fed to chickens are owned by huge factory farms that are under the control of big cooperation's and industries that own the Patten for this drugs are fed to the chickens through their feed. When these chickens are done growing they are took to slaughter and most of the profit goes to these companies that have made a contract with these farmers that have agreed to grow and raise these chickens.

IS it safe to consume chickens that have been fed antibiotics? in August that half the chickens sold in the local markets may be contaminated with high levels of nitrofuran, an antibiotic known to cause cancer. This became an interest to Malaysian Health Minister Datuk Chua Jui Meng. He revealed that half the chickens sold in the country contained cancer-causing nitrofuran, it reopened a long-standing controversy over the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in animal feed.

Continued’ Australia, France and Switzerland are among countries that have banned the use of any antibiotics in animal feed. Australia and France also disallow the use of hormones. The US has banned nitrofurans, chloramphenicol and ampicillin in animal feed, whilst Germany forbids penicillin and tertracycline, and the Netherlands has prohibited penicillin and tetracycline. In chicken meat, penicillin failed to kill the E. coli bacteria and the drugs chloramphenicol and neomycin had little effect on E. coli and two other types of bacteria. E. coli has been in the news recently as a particular strain of this bacteria (E. coli O-157) has caused Japan's most serious outbreak of food poisoning, in which over 9,000 people have been stricken and seven killed.

My sources http://www.circleofresponsibility.com/page/19/poultry.htm http://www.straight.com/article-143788/should-you-be-chicken-barnyard-antibiotics http://www.naturalnews.com/024756.html http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/06/17/playing-chicken-with-antibiotics/