The “they” are six researchers at The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, based at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.

The “it” is another attempt to alarm citizens with false and misleading information in an attempt to block another new chicken farm in Maryland. The “it” is contained in a letter to one Jennifer Feindt, a Farm Loan Specialist with the USDA Farm Service Agency.

But this time around they really have “egg” all over their collective faces. You see, the proposed farm will be a dairy farm converted to a chicken farm to raise broilers for Perdue Farms.

The JH folks claim there will be 200,000 birds there but Perdue says 150,000 is more like it. Pages 2 & 3 of the 5-page letter fall under a header of: Disease Transmission.

Most of the misleading misinformation in the letter is about the issue of antibiotic resistance and how modern farming practices are endangering health and causing expensive hospitalizations. They must not know that Perdue Farms has pledged to have over 95 percent of their chickens raised without antibiotics. OOPS!

They must not know that this proposed chicken farm will be all organic, no antibiotics and no chemicals. Double OOPS!!

And I wonder how much antibiotics were used to treat mastitis in those dairy cows compared to zero in the chickens?

They trot out the old 80 percent number of antibiotics sold are for use in animals, but worse yet they state that “A growing body of evidence provides support that pathogens can be found in and around broiler operations.” I do not know what the growing body of evidence is, as anyone with any kind of a health background and most others know there are pathogens everywhere such as the Staph aureus living on your skin and in your nasal cavity; some of it is even MRSA.

They talk about flies and odors associated with the birds, but I have to wonder why that would be such an issue if the current large dairy farm is not?

They also refer to a Dutch study that states that, according to the writers, 0.01 percent of the general population in the Netherlands are carriers of MRSA. They are wrong. Our own CDC says it is much higher with a carriage rate of the public from 2 percent to 3 percent in hospitalized patients it is 5 percent to 6 percent and in healthcare workers that rate can be as high as 20 percent. They have used this erroneous number before, including in a letter sent to the Accomack County Board of Supervisors in January 2016.

I submitted testimony at a public meeting last winter regarding the Accomack proposal and the misinformation in the Johns Hopkins letter. I guess they are not concerned about rewriting letters that are not accurate even when pointed out to them.

Scientists working at one of the nation’s most renowned medical centers and universities should be held to higher standards than they have been demonstrating in their quest to go meat free.

If you are really worried about the spread of pathogens that can threaten your health by a neighboring facility, then don’t let the county build a hospital near you. That is where “pathogens can be found in and around….”

They are at it again

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