By Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post
Excerpts:
When Jose Navarro landed a job as a federal poultry inspector in 2006, he moved his wife and newborn son to a rural town in Upstate New York near the processing plant, believing it was a steppingstone to a better life.
Five years later, Navarro was dead. The 37-year-old’s lungs had bled out.
His death triggered a federal investigation that raised questions about the health risks associated with a rise in the use of toxic, bacteria-killing chemicals in poultry plants. Agriculture Department health inspectors say processing plants are turning to the chemicals to remove contaminants that escape notice as processing line speeds have accelerated, in part to meet growing consumer demand for chicken and turkey.
The department is now poised to allow a further increase in line speeds, boosting the maximum by about 25 percent. This change is part of new regulations that officials say would make poultry production more efficient and reduce the number of government inspectors while increasing the number of private company inspectors.
Under the proposed rules, which could be finalized as soon as this summer, the number of chemical treatments used on the birds is also likely to increase further, according to agency documents and USDA inspectors who have worked in plants where line speeds have already accelerated.
To keep speeds up, the new regulations “would allow visibly contaminated poultry carcasses to remain online for treatment” — rather than being discarded or removed for off-line cleaning, as is now common practice. The proposed rules say “all carcasses” on the line would be treated with antimicrobial chemicals “whether they are contaminated or not.”
The heightened use of chemicals would follow a pattern that has already emerged in poultry plants. In a private report to the House Appropriations Committee, the USDA said that in plants that have already accelerated line speeds, workers have been exposed to larger amounts of cleaning agents. “The use of powerful antimicrobial chemicals has increased in order to decrease microbial loads on carcasses,” according to the 2010 report, recently obtained by The Washington Post.
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