NRDC and more than 30 other leading health, environment, animal welfare and consumer protection groups sent a letter to Foster Farms CEO Ron Foster today asking the company to disclose its use of antibiotics and pledge to avoid routine use of these drugs to raise its chickens (letter here - http://www.nrdc.org/food/
This comes on the heels of the USDA shutting down a Foster Farms plant last week due to a cockroach infestation and unsanitary conditions. And it follows the Salmonella outbreak last fall, which made over 400 people ill and was linked to Foster Farms. That was the second outbreak linked to Foster Farms in the past two years, the third in the last decade. In this latest outbreak, more than half of the Salmonella samples taken from outbreak patients were resistant to at least one antibiotic.
We all would like to know if Foster Farms, through its antibiotics practices, is breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria and contributing to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance that can threaten our health.
Jonathan Kaplan, NRDC`s Food & Agriculture Program director, offers more details about the sign-on letter and reasons for it here and pasted below:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/
