Taking cue from competitive pledges by multi-national fast food chains on offering antibiotic-free chicken before self-set deadlines, a poultry farm in Erode district has started offering such a product. The local company has promised to offer antibiotic-free chicken for the first time in the country, a claim Animal Husbandry Department has not verified so far. Growth-promoting antibiotics has been debated as a cause for concern as it could result in health risks for consumers who have started fearing that conventional broiler chicken meat causes drug-resistant illnesses
The meat industry is reportedly unable to do away with use of antibiotics due to fear of running into losses. Scientific tests, on the other hand, have generated evidence of health risk to humans due to sub-therapeutics use of antibiotics in food animals. In its recent report, the World Health Organisation has expressed its intention to “reduce the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in food animals for the protection of human health” and “terminate or rapidly phase out antimicrobials for growth promotion if they are used for human treatment.”
Tests have indicated that overuse of an antibiotic used to treat sick birds and protect them from E.coli infection has led to increase in treatment-resistant bacterial infections in humans.
The meat industry apprehends that avoidance of antibiotics would cause diseases, reduction in food safety, and loss in weight, thereby leading to rise in meat cost.
Nevertheless, there is no way for consumers to know whether or not the chicken they buy has been administered antibiotics.
As such, antibiotic-free chicken might imply value addition, perhaps, for fixing higher selling price, but the veracity of such claims could be checked only in well-equipped laboratories of TANUVAS at Namakkal and Chennai, Animal Husbandry Department officials said.
The Department has not entirely discounted the possibility of the claim being a marketing gimmick, though there was scope for increasing resistance of poultry through homeopathy and naturopathy medicines that do not cause any side-effects for humans.
Source : The Hindu
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