Healthy as a Chicken

There is much talk about antibiotics in animal agriculture, about antibiotic resistance as a side effect of their use, and about the danger of transferring this resistance to people who feed on the animal food chain.

These are alarms artfully created by organizations that skillfully mix truth and falsehood, crafting plausible news based on a fact they know: ordinary people are not sufficiently equipped to judge whether the news circulating is true or false.

Let’s get one thing straight: all commercially available chicken has been technically “antibiotic-free” for at least 20 years. Antibiotics are just one of the many tools farmers use to keep their animals healthy, but only if they get sick. They do so to avoid unnecessary suffering and to contribute to a healthy and safe food supply for humans, adhering to strict regulations that prohibit the possible use of medicinal products for curative purposes.

Today, for many years now, all modern chicken farms have adopted a health program followed by a licensed veterinarian.

Just like people, animals sometimes get sick, and treating illness is part of every breeder’s responsible behavior. We can also say that the care with which animals are treated is much more rigorous and controlled than what humans use for themselves. Veterinarians determine when and if antibiotics are necessary.

And, when necessary, the procedure requires that treated animals, before leaving the farm to enter the distribution chain, have completely eliminated all residual traces of the antibiotic from their systems. This is called the withdrawal period.

Antibiotics have essentially become a last resort, having long since given way to “natural” methods of disease prevention, which only modern farms can guarantee, such as protecting the animal’s health, and overall well-being, through extreme attention to the quality of the environment in which it is raised and the food it is fed.

PS: It is worth remembering that any bacteria, whether resistant to antibiotics or not, is not resistant to the heat of the oven or grill and is always eliminated by correct cooking.