Tyson
continues effort to cut antibiotics from chicken
production
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[March 11, 2015]
By P.J. Huffstutter
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Tyson Foods Inc has
removed gentamicin, a key antibiotic for human use, from company
hatcheries, the company told Reuters on Tuesday.
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Arkansas-based Tyson, the nation's largest chicken producer, said
the drug and other antibiotics have not been used at its 35
hatcheries since Oct. 1, 2014. The company had not previously given
details of what drugs were used at the hatcheries, where chicks are
born and kept briefly before being moved to poultry farms.
Gentamicin is a member of an antibiotic class considered "highly
important" in human medicine by the federal Food and Drug
Administration.
The poultry industry has long been under pressure to stop feeding
medically important antibiotics to otherwise healthy livestock. Meat
companies have used the drugs both to stave off disease and to
promote more rapid growth.
Last week, McDonald's Corp said its U.S. restaurants will gradually
stop buying chicken raised with antibiotics vital to fighting human
infections. Tyson Foods is a major chicken supplier to McDonald's.
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Tyson told Reuters this week it is also testing alternatives to
medically-important antibiotics for use on the farms that house its
chickens after they leave the hatcheries. It says it does not use
antibiotics for growth promotion on the farms, but does use them,
according to its website, "when prescribed by a veterinarian to
treat or prevent disease."
Rival chicken producer Perdue Farms announced last summer that it
had stopped using all antibiotics in its hatcheries, including
gentamicin, because it wanted "to move away from conventional
antibiotic use" due to "growing consumer concern and our own
questions about the practice."
Gentamicin has been commonly used in hatcheries to fight off
infection or prevent disease, including in fertilized eggs,
livestock veterinarians and other poultry producers say.
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Tyson sees the policy shift as "a significant first step toward our
goal of reducing the use of antibiotics that are also used in human
medicine," according to its website.
Tyson has reduced the volume of medically-important antibiotics used
in its chicken business by 84 percent since 2011 and the "vast
majority of the antibiotics used to raise our chickens are never
used in humans," according to a company statement.
While veterinary use of antibiotics is legal, the risk is that
overuse could spur the creation of so-called superbugs that develop
cross-resistance to antibiotics used to treat humans. Reuters found
last year that major U.S. poultry firms were administering
antibiotics to their flocks on the farm far more pervasively than
regulators realized.
(Reporting By P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Jo Winterbottom)
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