Think twice before you eat chicken as a recent study has found that those who eat chicken quite frequently stand the risk of developing resistance to antibiotic drugs and there is a reason behind this. Greedy poultry owners are feeding antibiotic substances to the chicken as that hastens their growth and weight. In other words, poultry industry is using antibiotic into chicken to promote growth and increase weight.
The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in its study has claimed that antibiotic is being used in chicken in Delhi and NCR at large scale, causing growing antibiotic resistance system in human body. It said that 70 chicken samples from Delhi and NCR were tested for six commonly used antibiotics during a recent study.
While 40 per cent tested positive, residues of more than one antibiotic were found in 17 per cent samples. A study conducted by the CSE’s Pollution Monitoring laboratory (PMl) revealed that it has tested 70 samples of chicken in Delhi and NCR out of which 36 samples were picked from Delhi, 12 from Noida, eight from Gurgaon and seven each from Faridabad and Ghaziabad. Three tissues — muscle, liver and kidney — were tested for the presence of six antibiotics widely used in poultry — oxytetracycline, chlortetracycline and doxycycline (class tetracyclines), enrofloxacin and ciprofloxacin (class fluoroquinolones) and neomycin, an aminoglycoside.
Explaining the fallout of this, CSE officials said that large-scale misuse and overuse of antibiotics in poultry industry is leading to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the chicken itself. “These bacteria are then transmitted to humans through food or environment. Additionally, eating small doses of antibiotics through chicken can also lead to development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans”, the study said.
It said that in India, there is growing evidence that resistance to fluoroquinolones such as ciprofloxacin is rapidly increasing. “Treating fatal diseases like sepsis, pneumonia and tuberculosis (TB) with fluoroquinolones is becoming tough because microbes that cause these diseases are increasingly becoming resistant to fluoroquinolones”, the study said.
CSE researchers point out that antibiotics are frequently pumped into chicken during its life cycle of 35-42 days. They are occasionally given as a drug to treat infections regularly mixed with feed to promote growth and routinely administered to all birds for several days to prevent infections. The CSE also recommended banning the use of antibiotics as growth promoters and for mass disease prevention, not allowing antibiotics critical for humans in poultry industry, not using antibiotics as a feed additive, regulation of poultry feed industry by the government and not selling unlicensed and unlabelled antibiotics in market among others.
