Poultry Hatcheries Infect Small Flockers

A rash of Salmonella infections has made numerous small flock and backyard poultry owners sick.  The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC") reports the following facts:

• 181 people infected, 33 hospitalized, none dead;
• Outbreaks started as early as Feb. 20 2015 and continue to today and beyond;
• Infections are spread across 40 States in the USA;
• 4 simultaneous outbreaks (40 people across 16 States, 69 people across 30 States, 56 people across 16 States; 16 people across 8 States);
• 9 different strains of Salmonella are involved;
• 86% of the infected persons reported contact with poultry prior to becoming sick;
• 95 ill people have been interviewed so far to trace the source of these infections;
• 67% of the ill people who had purchase records available, reported purchasing live baby poultry from 17 different feed supply stores and hatcheries spread across multiple States;
• Multiple hatcheries have been identified as the source of the infected chicks and ducklings;
• None of the Salmonella strains are Superbugs (ie. resistant to 1 or more antibiotics)
• Many of the ill people report cuddling, kissing, or having the poultry inside their homes

It is unknown why or how multiple hatcheries are simultaneously or serially involved.  Is there a common source for the Salmonella that infected all of these 4 hatcheries?  University of Kentucky lists about 90 hatcheries who serve Small Flockers in the USA.  As more infection data comes in and/or our understanding improves, will more of these hatcheries be implicated with Salmonella poisoning?  Only time will tell.

In Canada, Canadian Hatchery Egg Producers ("CHEP") says there are 240 broiler hatching egg farmers in eight provinces across Canada.  There are even more who do other eggs than broiler chickens.  Only 12 of those hatcheries are HACCP (ie. biosecurity & food safety) certified by CFIA.

CDC offers the following recommendations for backyard poultry to protect against Salmonella infections.

Cuddling, kissing, or having the poultry inside your homes (rather than keeping the poultry in an outdoor coop) significantly raise the risk of infecting humans, and are not recommended.

Hands should be thoroughly washed with soap & water before handling poultry (to protect the birds), and washed again after you are finished handling poultry (to protect the people).  Never, ever kiss or cuddle poultry, nor touch your face with hands that might be infected with Salmonella.

Also, in addition to the Salmonella that could be lurking there, be aware that some hatcheries purposefully place drugs on the chick's yellow fluff feathers, the drug dries on the chick's fluff, then other chicks will peck off the drug and eat it, thereby becoming dosed with the prescribed chicken drug.

Epidemic Spread Timeline for Salmonella Infections in Backyard Poultry in USA

Vaccination of chicken flocks against Salmonella can be done, but we don't know if this was done by these hatcheries.  Vaccination against salmonella only reduces the risk by 1/3 to 1/2 for the flock's Salmonella incidence rate of what occurs among non-vaccinated flocks (see http://aem.asm.org/content/76/23/7820.full ).  Were these Salmonella outbreaks a case of stopping vaccination programs for the infected chicks, or were we just lucky prior to this? Today, we have no answers.

It seems to me that these small flocks were cross-contaminated from the same source:  the hatcheries who provided the Salmonella contaminated chicks.

Small Flockers have little or no capability to detect, prevent, or mitigate the risks from an infected supply (chicks or otherwise) that is purchased by a Small Flock farmer.  Small Flockers trust (perhaps too much) that their suppliers will provide healthy, non-contaminated chicks, feed, supplies, etc.

Allowing (or encouraging) family or visitors to kiss baby chicks, or not wash hands before or after contact with farm animals is a breach of biosecurity protocols, whether on Small Flock farms, or commercial chicken factories.  High risk behaviours that are strongly recommended against.

Skeptics Live Forever

There are skeptics and deniers of strong scientific evidence located everywhere.  Supply Management ("SM") is no exception.

How long will supporters of Canada's
Supply Management stick their heads
in the sand to avoid hearing and seeing
the truth?

You don't have to be the first person to believe every rumor that comes your way.  That is the definition of being gullible and naive.

However, there comes a time when the evidence mounts and mounts to a point that continuing to deny borders on insanity.  That is what scientists call Cognitive Dissonance:

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance focuses on how humans strive for internal consistency. When inconsistency (dissonance) is experienced, individuals tend to become psychologically uncomfortable and are motivated to attempt to reduce this dissonance, as well as actively avoiding situations and information which are likely to increase it.

 How does this apply to Canada's Supply Management System?  It appears that we have not yet reached a state of Cognitive Dissonance for Supply Management in Canada.

Go back to sleep, it's not yet time to wake up!

To prepare for the awakening (or to hasten its arrival), I have presented evidence suggesting there are 2.7 deaths per year of Canadians that are caused by SM chicken contaminated by salmonella that is regularly sold at retail stores in Canada (see SFPFC's Blog Posting 2.7 Canadians Die Each Year from SM's Contaminated Chicken   and discussions about this evidence on Better Farming.

Those 2.7 deaths/yr from Canadian SM chicken was based upon both US and Canadian data.  I have openly declared from the very beginning my use of US data due to the lack of Canadian data.  Not everything is identical in both US and Canada, but they are often similar.  Until we have the necessary data for Canada, the US data can help us estimate the likely effects and risks on a qualitative or approximate basis.

In spite of this, the skeptics have totally rejected all evidence against SM's questionable methods as useless. It appears that the skeptics feel that SM Canadian chicken is perfect, the best in the world, and are unwilling to consider any suggestion to the contrary.

I agree that there is some room for doubt in these food safety risk assessments; there always will be.  However, there is a concept called "Precautionary Principle", first developed in Germany in the 1980's.

As to application of the Precautionary Principle for ensuring the health of Canadians, Health Canada says:

 "The Health Canada Decision Making Framework treats the concept of precaution as pervasive. As such it does not require extremes in the actions taken. Instead, risk management strategies reflect the context and nature of the issue, including the urgency, scope and level of action required."

Shouldn't the Precautionary Principle also be applied to SM's practices?

There is also the principle of Occam's Razor, which says the best answer is usually the simplest answer with the fewest assumptions.

In spite of these two principles, there are those who still assume and believe in geocentrism (ie. the Earth is at the centre of our solar system, not the Sun).  This argument started around 2,000 BC and continues to today, over 4,000 years and counting.

Somehow, I don't think the SM debate will end any time soon.

There are also those skeptics who believe the Earth is flat (ie. not a globe, see Flat Earth Society)

DDT was seen as a wonderful pesticide for the first 14 years (1948 - 1962), but slowly the mounting scientific evidence suggested otherwise.

Other skeptics still insisted in sworn testimony before the US Congress in 1994 that the scientific proof was far from conclusive as to whether cigarette smoking caused lung cancer or addiction.  That was 38 years after Doll & Hill's study of British physicians in 1956 first offered scientific evidence of what was suspected for 400 years before that.

To be a skeptic is every individuals choice, to believe as they will.  Soon, SM Believers may be added to the deniers of other scientific evidence listed above.  We'll have to wait to see for sure.

Do you believe it is OK for the masses being doomed to suffer as long as there is at least one person left who chooses to deny the overwhelming body of evidence against SM?

I believe there is now sufficient scientific evidence to take action to improve SM chicken so as to reduce the risk and cost of this terrible system.

Further denial of the available scientific evidence delays the solution, and increases the risk and suffering for all.

2.7 Canadians Die Each Year from SM's Contaminated Chicken

Based on scientific, objective evidence, we can reasonably conclude that approximately 2.7 Canadians are killed each year by contaminated chicken purchased in Canada.  Since the Supply Management system has about 99.96% market share, this government regulated, approved system run by the #ChickenMafia can (and should) be held fully responsible for those needless deaths.

This follows on my previous Blog posting "Deadly Canadian Chicken" which explored food-borne illness, and how poultry has been in the top 3 sources of food poisoning for decades.

The calculation of 2.7 Canadian deaths per year from SM poultry is based on the following data from objective scientific sources:

1. The deaths from foodborne illness are not always the direct cause of death.  Sometimes people die from the complications caused or contributed to by the food poisoning.  For example, one 26 year old man died of a heart attack that resulted from a severe bout of Salmonella Heidelberg food poisoning (Ref. 1).  However, there is no mistaking the signs that this was food poisoning that started the problems.
    
2. There are 35.54 million Canadians as of 2014 (Ref. 2)
3. There is no readily available statistics on salmonella foodborne illnesses in Canada, but we can use US data as a proxy until Canada can produce our own data.  The US data says there are 0.9 cases per year of salmonella per 100,000 population, of which 71% are hospitalized and 5% died. (Ref. 3)
    
4. US Centre of Disease Control has tracked cases of foodborne illness from 1998 to 2008, and found that between 10.1% to 29.2% of all cases of Salmonella poisoning were caused by contaminated poultry (Ref. 4)
5. The geometric mean of the range 10.1 to 29.2 is 17.17%
6. The calculation is as follows:   (35.54 Million)/(100,000)*(0.05)*(0.1717)=3.05 Canadians killed each year from poultry contaminated by Salmonella.
7. Canadians consume 4.2 kg/yr/person of turkey, and 31.2 kg/yr/person of chicken.  Therefore chicken represents 88.14% of the poultry marketshare on a weighted average.  Therefore Canadian chicken is responsible for 2.7 deaths each year from Salmonella poisoning and/or the resulting complications.
8. Since the SM #ChickenMafia has over 99% marketshare, and their chicken is 10 times more contaminated than the chicken raised by Small Flockers and processed on the farm for personal consumption (see Blog posting Hope for the Mega Meat Manufacturers? where I compare the chicken factory 3,600 CFU vs. the Small Flocker on-farm result of 133 CFU) , it seems reasonable to attribute at least 99% of these deaths to the #ChickenMafia.  On a weighted average CFU count, #ChickenMafia puts out 99.99852% of the total contamination into the marketplace, just 0.001478% by Small Flockers.
9. Therefore Canada's #ChickenMafia (Chicken Farmers of Canada, Chicken Farmers of Ontario, and all the other provincial boards) are fully responsible for 2.7 deaths per year from chicken contaminated with Salmonella.
10. Note that chicken is contaminated by many more pathogens than just Salmonella, so the real problem is much worse than what has been calculated here.

So what is the government going to do about an approved, highly regulated system that kills 2.7 Canadians each year?

I previously raised the issue of contaminated food, contrary to Canada's Food & Drug Act, but the Federal bureaucrats ignored the issue (see Blog posting "If It's Contaminated, Is It Food?").

Does it make it any easier or better now that we have reasonably estimated that 2.7 Canadians per year lose their life while both the Federal and Provincial bureaucrats fiddle?

If it was one of your family members killed by contaminated chicken knowingly sold in Canada, would that be OK with you?