Arsenic in the form of an organoarsenical, Roxarsone, is routinely fed to 80(ish)% of the billions of billions of broiler chickens grown for food in the US. Roxarsone has been found to treat or prevent disease that would be ubiquitous given the living conditions to which most chickens are subject (packed into small square footages, living and breathing in their own shit and the shit of their neighbours and neighbours' neighbours). It has also been shown that Roxarsone makes chickens grow bigger faster, and have pinker looking flesh. yum! Most of the Roxarsone passes through the chicken and into the litter, and only a small amount gets deposited in chicken muscle tissue. Good news, right? Well, as good of news as you can get when you find out your meaty McChicken is being fed arsenic?
So you needn't concern yourself too much with worries over arsenic uptake into the chicken you feed yourself and your family, but you might be concerned with where the rest of the roxarsone goes. Well duh, it goes into chicken waste, and no one eats chicken shit so what's the big deal? The deal is that chicken shit is anaerobically composted, which releases all or almost all of the arsenic in the organic complex as the inorganic (and more potently toxic) compound arsenate in the process. So what? Well, this usually then gets added to the soil to grow crops for our food or the feed for our food. Now, arsenate is a compound that usually holds pretty tightly to soil particles, particularly soils that are high in iron oxides. However, in anaerobic conditions, little buggies that live in soil can reduce arsenate into arsenite, which is more toxic and more mobile in soils - it can be released into ground water, or it can be taken up by plants - i.e. our food or the food that feeds our food. The deeper into the soil you get, the less likely you are to have access to oxygen, and thus the more likely you are to become anaerobic - especially if saturated with water, such as where the soil meets the water table.
This may not be that big of an issue for me personally given that where I live there isn't a whole lot of large-scale chicken factorying (sorry, "farming") - and probably isn't an issue for anyone outside of the US (The EU forbids the use of Roxarsone in chicken farming, I imagine other countries have taken the EU's stance). However, the widespread and large scale use of Roxarsone has the potential to become a major public health issue, especially if you eat plants or animals who eat plants grown in areas which use chicken manure as a main soil amendment.
It's also a potential public health issue if water is being pulled from wells in those areas to water cattle or people.
Now I'm not talking about a mass poisoning of the midwest or southeast (where the bulk of these chickens are raised), I'm talking about chronic low-dosages being administered to people across the country, but especially people in these locales - inorganic arsenic is a known human carcinogen, causing or promoting lung, liver, skin, and many other cancers. of course, inorganic arsenic is also acutely and potently toxic.
Roxarsone itself is angiogenic, which can promote the growth of tumors and thus also has the potential to cause all kinds of cancers.
On top of the hideous conditions these chickens are grown in and the hideous genetics the chickens are born into, we are feeding them arsenic to help them grow bigger, faster, and without regard to potential health effects to humans, citizens of America, down the road.
Also little or no regard is paid to workers handling these chickens and their roxarsone-laced feed.
Huh. the things you learn.
the average weight of the US broiler chicken has nearly doubled in the last 60 years, and the demand for chicken in the US has absolutely skyrocketed. Roxarsone has been a common additive in chicken feed since the 1970s and its use has skyrocketed with the exponentially growing demand for chicken flesh.
But no one in the 70s thought to consider potential human health effects, and especially not chronic health effects...and if they did they probably weren't given much if any funding to study it because the amount of monetary clout the chicken industry had...and certainly has now.
Thank God I don't eat chicken. Don't even get me started about pork.
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