CRAP - Fresh chicken manure still used

[impeach the gop]

The next bad beef scandal?

Cattle feed now contains things like manure and dead cats

BY MICHAEL SATCHELL AND STEPHEN J. HEDGES

It was about as exciting as things get in quiet Columbus, Neb. Last week, just a few days after their arrival, a SWAT team of
agricultural inspectors forced the closing of the town's Hudson Foods Co. plant, declaring that a jumbled record system and
questionable procedures made it difficult, if not impossible, to determine how E. coli bacteria had tainted the hamburger patties
fashioned there. The bad meat, the inspectors found, came from one of seven slaughterhouses that supplied Hudson on June 5.
Just which one wasn't immediately clear. Hudson recalled 25 million pounds of its meat, and Agriculture Secretary Dan
Glickman offered assurances that the plant would not open until "far more stringent safety standards" had been adopted. "All
evidence at this point," he added, "indicates that we have contained the outbreak."

Glickman's declaration may have been a tad premature. The true extent of the Hudson hamburger contamination will remain a
mystery until inspectors know exactly which plants supplied the beef. From there, they will have to investigate further to
determine if Hudson's suppliers also sent bad meat to other food companies. What is indisputable, however, is that the problems
at Hudson represent only one of many threats to the nation's meat supply.

Bargain breakfast. Agriculture experts say a slew of new and questionable methods of fattening cattle are being employed by
farmers. To trim costs, many farmers add a variety of waste substances to their livestock and poultry feed--and no one is
making sure they are doing so safely. Chicken manure in particular, which costs from $15 to $45 a ton in comparison with up
to $125 a ton for alfalfa, is increasingly used as feed by cattle farmers despite possible health risks to consumers. In regions
with large poultry operations, such as California, the South, and the mid-Atlantic, more and more farmers are turning to chicken
manure as a cheaper alternative to grains and hay.

Lamar Carter is one such cattle farmer. Carter recently purchased 745 tons of litter scooped from the floors of local chicken
houses, stacking it 12 feet high on his farm near Dardanelle, Ark. After allowing the protein-rich excrement to heat up for seven
to 10 days, Carter mixes it with smaller amounts of soybean bran, and feeds this fecal slumgullion to his 800 head of cattle. "My
cows are fat as butterballs," Carter says. "If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too
expensive."

Health officials are not as enthusiastic. Chicken manure often contains campylobacter and salmonella bacteria, which can
cause disease in humans, as well as intestinal parasites, veterinary drug residues, and toxic heavy metals such as arsenic, lead,
cadmium, and mercury. These bacteria and toxins are passed on to the cattle and can be cycled to humans who eat beef
contaminated by feces during slaughter. A scientific paper scheduled for publication this fall in the journal Preventive Medicine
points to the potential dangers of recycling chicken waste to cattle. "Feeding manure that has not been properly processed is
supercharging the cattle feces with pathogens likely to cause disease in consumers," says Dr. Neal Barnard, head of the
Washington, D.C.--based health lobby Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an author of the article.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates there may be as many as 80 million incidences of
food-borne illness each year in the United States, and about 9,000 deaths. Salmonella accounts for 4 million cases, of which 500
to 1,000 are fatal. Campylobacter, which causes acute gastroenteritis, afflicts between 4 million and 6 million people annually,
killing about 100. E. coli, the bacteria that was found in the tainted Hudson Foods beef, causes up to 250 fatalities and triggers
serious illness in up to 20,000 people annually. At least 17 people have fallen ill from eating contaminated Hudson beef.

Agricultural refuse such as corncobs, rice hulls, fruit and vegetable peelings, along with grain byproducts from retail production of
baked goods, cereals, and beer, have long been used to fatten cattle. In addition, some 40 billion pounds a year of slaughterhouse
wastes like blood, bone, and viscera, as well as the remains of millions of euthanized cats and dogs passed along by veterinarians
and animal shelters, are rendered annually into livestock feed--in the process turning cattle and hogs, which are natural
herbivores, into unwitting carnivores.

http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:P16--43k7_QJ:www.organicconsumers.org/shit.html+chicken+manure+cattle+feed&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[SpiralHawk]

1. Compost that shit

the right way, for crying out loud.

[Q3JR4]

2. I can't believe

that they are allowed to get away with all of this.

Consumers need to wake up.

:grr:

[Hell Hath No Fury]

3. Yup...

I first read that on the Howard Lyman site www.madcowboy.com

Although I already did not eat meat, my first response was, "Why would I ever want to eat something that was fed chicken SHIT????"

Yeagads, the ranchers claim that it fatten's the cattle up real good....

Bleck.

[Divernan]

4. That means chicken FLESH contains drug residues & toxic

heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury & arsenic! See paragraph five of the preceeding post.
Haven't you ever wondered why the FOOD (emphasis added) & Drug Administration doesn't control inspections of the food processing industry, instead of the Agriculture Department?

[fortyfeetunder]

5. gag!

Adds a whole new meaning to the term "eat $hit"!

[cliss]

6. Who said Bush doesn't support recycling?

Thanks for the post ITG.

THIS is the reason why I gave up meat over 10 years ago. This is also the reason why my carnivorous co-workers are now coming to me, nervously asking what to do next.

By the way, the notion of feeding our cattle pure crap, road-kill and other garbage like cement dust and wood fiber, is not just confined to the U.S.

When the Mad Cow scare was flaring up in the UK, attention started to focus on other countries' cow feeding practices. In France, it was discovered that french farmers were feeding their cows human excrement. That's Human Crap, mixed into the cows' feeding pellets (diverted from Le French Sewers).

American USDA inspectors insisted that french farmers needed to quit this horrendous practice immediately. The French refused, saying that there was no danger to the practice, and it was a good way of taking advantage of the nutrients still available in the waste.

Talk about a load of crap.