Tainted poultry that left one boy paralyzed is still being sold all over the US
A Vice News report that aired on the network revealed the terrifying way that dangerous chicken is being sold all over the United States and it's putting kids in comas.
The story details the fate of several young children who ate chicken nuggets at fast food establishments like Chick-fil-a, McDonald's and other places that left them so ill it will take years to recover. At issue is chicken tainted with campylobacter, which has now become the biggest foodborne illness in the United States.
Between 2015 and 2020 companies continued to sell the tainted meat despite investigations by the USDA. Records obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism from the government revealed that more than half of the chickens tested had antibiotic-resistant strains of the disease.
In 2017, it was revealed that former President Donald Trump was appointing USDA staff that were "stunningly unqualified," reported Vanity Fair at the time. Trump also rolled back an executive order that set regulations on the chicken industry trying to process more chicken faster.
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The Vice report revealed that some level of campylobacter and even salmonella is acceptable. However, companies including Koch Foods, Tyson, Foster Farms, Perdue and Pilgrim's Pride all have gone beyond those regulations "multiple times since 2018," which is when monitoring began.
The more disturbing revelation is that if the chickens are contaminated with more than acceptable levels of disease, they're not recalled. Plants that go beyond the acceptable limits over and over can be shut down, but only temporarily.
"Separate government records also show that between January 2015 and August 2019, the same 12 major US poultry companies broke food safety rules on at least 145,000 occasions — or on average more than 80 times a day," said the report.
Workers even revealed that when they smelled rotten meat, they were still told to process it. More than one reported witnessing safety inspectors sleeping on the job and dead bugs being thrown into grinders.
"Since [the meat] comes to us really dirty, when we open the box, it’s like, 'Let’s see what’s inside!'" a Tyson plant worker in Arkansas said. "Sometimes it has flies, it has crickets, cockroaches in there already frozen."
When he showed it to supervisors, they weren't interested.
Every year, 1.5 million Americans are infected with campylobacter, leading to more than 100 deaths. It also causes 40 percent of the U.S. cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which causes the body's immune system to attack its own nerves.
"You don't think that going through a drive-through and handing that brown paper bag to your kid in the back seat could cost them potentially their life," said mom Ashley Queipo who took her son to a Florida Chick-Fil-A in 2020. "But that is the reality."
Read the full report of the crisis and the children who suffer as a result at Vice News. You can also see a clip of the report below:
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