"Amid a busy season of summer food recalls and illnesses, sustainable farming advocates are warning that salmonella bacteria found in poultry is increasing strains most likely to cause illness, hospitalization and death, and that such bacteria are also increasingly resistant to antibiotic medicine.
The report from Farm Forward comes a year after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) withdrew a rule proposed during the Biden administration aimed at preventing poultry contaminated with salmonella from making it to grocery store shelves and poisoning people.
The USDA maintains that the overall rate of salmonella in tested poultry has decreased over the past decade. But critics say the agency continues to have lax regulations on salmonella in poultry and that the new report shows that Americans are increasingly in danger of getting sick from tainted chicken and turkey.
“We have a poultry industry in America that has become dominated by a single production system of giant animal factories, cramming thousands of birds together in filthy conditions that make foodborne illnesses like salmonella extremely likely,” said Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward."
