German doctors sound the alarm: in the chicken meat microbes resistant to antibiotics
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
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The Ministry of Consumer Protection is preparing a law restricting the use of antibiotics in livestock.
What is worse: the antibiotics that we swallow with meat, or the microbes contained in the same meat, already resistant to antibiotics? Many Germans took care of this issue and decided: both are bad. The result is obvious: the inhabitants of Germany buy less chicken writes test.org.ua. The fact is that the other day the German environmental organization BUND published frightening results of the study. In each second sample of chicken from supermarkets, microbes resistant to antibiotics were detected. The Ministry of Agriculture and Consumer Protection is going to legislatively limit the use of antibiotics in livestock.
The problem is industrial cattle breeding
Where is she, a rural idyll? The average chicken lives 32 days, the pig - 4 months. Then they turn into chicken and pork. Industrial complexes for more than 100,000 chickens or thousands of pigs are not uncommon. Instruction of the European Union allows for the fattening of hens density of 39 kilograms per square meter. If we assume that the commercial weight of a chicken is about two kilograms, you get 20 birds per square meter.
Chickens in the industrial complex
Industrial poultry farming. In such conditions, without drugs, animals can not survive. Their use is limited by a special law. Antibiotics can be used only in case of a disease prescribed by a veterinarian. But with such crowding the disease immediately spreads. And how to prescribe individual therapy of one of hundreds of thousands of birds? So it turns out that chickens on average for their short life 2,3 times are treated with antibiotics, pigs - 5.3 times.
There is no direct threat to health, but the appetite is gone
Microbes resistant to antibiotics are everywhere in our habitat. And this is due to the too wide application of drugs, not only in livestock, but also in medicine, says Sabina Klein, employee of the Center for Consumer Protection of the Federal North Rhine-Westphalia. Therefore, the direct link between antibiotic-resistant microbes in chicken meat and the use of antibiotics in poultry farming has not been proven.
How to protect yourself from harmful microbes?
Employee of the Consumer Rights Protection Center in Hamburg, ArminValet, gives simple advice: to observe the rules of hygiene in cooking. To wash hands. Do not cut vegetables for salad with the same knife that you just chopped the chicken. At least ten minutes to cook meat at a temperature of not less than 70 degrees - this will destroy all germs.
In Germany, chicken meat is the cheapest. But you can buy chicken or pork and a bioproduct store. There they give a guarantee that the animals were fattened without the use of antibiotics. In addition, they were kept in more favorable conditions, and fattening lasts longer. Accordingly, such a chicken does not cost 4 euros or even less, but 20 euros or even more. And this is not affordable for everyone.
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