I keep reading the intentional misleading, misinformation claiming our meat from cows, pigs and poultry is “laced with antibiotics” that may lead to allergic reactions or antibiotic resistant bacteria in our personal biomes.

I decided it was worth my time to do a little research, and provide readers with some information they can use when debating the issue of antibiotic residues in meats. For time constraints I limited most of my search to residues in chicken meat (retirement keeps me busy with other ventures).

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service publishes an annual report called The Red Book. These are available to the public through the FSIS web page at: www.fsis.usda.gov.

In looking back at the last five years of Red Book data, Oct. 1, 2012 through Sept. 30, 2017, the following statistics regarding testing of young chickens (broilers) become available:

Number of samples tested; approximately 3,500. None inspector-generated.
Number of non-violative positives (some residue present, but not exceeding the FDA maximum levels determined to protect human health.); 2
Number of violative positives; 1

The violative sample was in 2017 and was an antibiotic belonging to the nitrofurazone class, trade name often Furacin, and an ointment used to cover burns in human health.

FSIS does not name the positive compound found if it was non-violative, so these two could be antibiotics or some other compound tested for that occurs in nature like dioxin.

So while it is not quite right, nor accurate, to say that chicken meat absolutely never contains antibiotics because of FDA mandated withdrawal times, it is safe to say that in the last five years only approximately 0.012 percent of chickens tested for residues had an antibiotic level that exceeded the FDA’s safe and approved limits, and it was an antibiotic used as an ointment in human medicine.

And if the other two positives were antibiotics, a fact we cannot determine, even then only approximately 0.08 percent of all chicken meat tested positive for antibiotics over a five-year span.

I know for a fact that over on the four-legged side of the equation FSIS finds a little higher level of violations of antibiotic residues in bob veal calves and old, spent dairy cattle, but even then the percentages remain very low.

Of the inspector-generated tests in the October 2016 through September 2017 year, there were 177,000 samples taken, only 681 of which violated FDA maximum residual levels. Of those in violation, 480 were in dairy cows and 70 in bob veal calves.

So we know where are problems are, albeit very small, and it is not chicken.

Let’s clean up our act and make the anti-animal industry crowd find something else to crow about.

A closer look at antibiotic residues in meat

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