MD Senate Moves to Ban Arsenic in Chicken Feed

Senate weakens arsenic chicken-feed ban

State senators are scheduled to take a final vote today on whether to ban the use of arsenic in poultry feed, with proponents arguing it's needed to protect Marylanders and the Chesapeake Bay while Eastern Shore lawmakers contend it's unwarranted meddling with the state's poultry industry.  Chicken and turkey producers have long used roxarsone, a veterinary drug containing arsenic, to treat common avian diseases and to plump up their birds. But the practice has raised concerns for human health and the environment.

As I have noted previously, roxarsone is a organo-arsenic compound with low human (and other vertebrate) toxicity.  It is added to chicken feed at low part per million concentrations to inhibit microbial intestinal parasites which weaken chickens and cause low growth, and sometimes disease.  It passes through the chicken gut largely unchanged into the chicken litter.  In the litter piles and if the chicken litter is used as fertilizer (as much of it is) the roxarsone degrades into inorganic arsenic, the same form found naturally in soils at part per million concentrations.  In short, as a horrifying study in environmental toxicology, this is pretty much a dud.

That doesn't prevent people who don't know the chemistry and toxicology from being scared by the word arsenic.

The maker of roxarsone, a subsidiary of Pfizer Inc., suspended sales of the drug nationwide last July after a Food and Drug Administration study found low levels of inorganic arsenic, a carcinogen, in the livers of treated chickens. Other studies have detected arsenic in chickens' manure and in waterways next to fields fertilized with poultry manure.

I can "detect" arsenic in any medium I care to  try.  That's doesn't mean it's derived from pollution, or that it's hazardous.  Chesapeake Bay water contains higher levels of arsenic than most streams flowing into it.  It's not from pollution, it's from the oceans, which has higher concentrations of arsenic than most fresh waters.  The fact that the studies behind this are so sketchy suggests that no one really expects this to be a significant problem

Environmentalists are pressing for a state ban because of the unsettled nature of the federal regulatory action. The FDA has not formally withdrawn approval for the drug. Agency spokeswoman Tamara Ward emailed that "FDA is conducting some additional confirmatory testing to address some remaining scientific questions." She couldn't say when that testing would be complete.

Interesting.  If I recall correctly, all the "left" people were up in arms when the state of Arizona attempted to enforce a law against illegal immigration, when the federal government has a similar law that it was unwilling to enforce.

Proponents of the ban argue that the drug is not needed, noting that Salisbury-based Perdue Farms, one of the nation's largest poultry producers, stopped using it on its flocks in 2007. Perdue still opposes the ban, though. Spokeswoman Julie DeYoung emailed that the company believes the state shouldn't set limits on a practice already regulated by the federal government.

In the grand scheme of things, banning arsenic in chicken feed, is, well, chicken feed.  I accept that the state has the right to do so; I simply don't think they have a compelling reason to do so. It will (and probably already has) weakened the chicken farming industry on the Maryland's Eastern Shore, by making them less efficient than producers elsewhere in the country not similarly restricted.

However, I don't think the people pushing the arsenic ban really care about the chicken farmers; they just want to score a point for thoughtless environmentalism by banning a element with a bad name.