Donald Ross worked for years in poultry plants on the Eastern Shore, hanging chickens on hooks, weighing them, packing them and wielding a knife in the "kill room."
About four months ago, he nicked the middle finger on his left hand. The tiny cut should have healed quickly, but it ballooned instead into a festering golf ball-size lesion. Months of antibiotic treatments failed to shrink it, and it had to be surgically removed.
Ross, 46, and a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher suspect his infection was caused by drug-resistant bacteria in chickens at the Temperanceville, Va., plant where he worked. They point to the poultry industry's routine use of millions of pounds of antibiotics to make chickens plumper.
Toxicologist Ellen K. Silbergeld plans to include Ross among more than 100 current and former Eastern Shore poultry handlers in a study of whether the industry's growing use of antibiotics is harming human health and the environment.
Although Ross' injury was minor, Silbergeld says it hints at a broader problem: that antibiotics in chicken feed might be creating tough, drug-resistant bacteria that cling to workers' hands and wash off farms into rivers. Other researchers have found that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are making their way into meat sold in grocery stores.
"This is a very serious issue. I believe there is a lot of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is getting out into the community and into the environment, and nobody is paying attention to what it's doing," said Silbergeld, who has also studied lead poisoning in Baltimore and mercury contamination in the Amazon.
Antibiotics in animal feed have become a national concern, with McDonald's restaurants recently pledging to work with poultry suppliers to phase out growth-promoting antibiotics that are also used in human medicine.
The drugs are a significant issue for the poultry industry on the Delmarva peninsula, which last year included 1,900 farms selling 576 million chickens that were processed by 14,100 workers.
Richard L. Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, a trade group that represents companies that process most of the 8.7 billion chickens sold in the United States every year, defended the industry's use of antibiotics.
Farmers have been routinely adding microbe-killing formulas to chicken feed since the 1950s, Lobb said.
