Be Very Careful Eating Chickens You Buy at the Supermarket

If you believed pledges of no hormones or antibiotics by chicken producers -- even those claiming to be organic -- makes those animals raised on factory farms you buy from the grocery store any safer to eat, you should think twice before doing it again, according to this alarming Consumer Reports expose.

The amazing 83 percent of the chickens testing positive for campylobacter or salmonella represents a frightening increase from the 49 percent Consumer Reports found just three years ago.

And some of the worst offenders among the 525 samples tested (taken from 23 states) were from chickens labeled as organic or raised without antibiotics.

And, no surprise, the current standards chicken producers use to keep contamination in check and allegedly protect consumers -- called the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) -- aren't enough to prevent it.

Each full-grown chicken in a factory farm has as little as six-tenths of a square foot of space. These extremely overcrowded conditions pave the way for disease. Many are also genetically modified, and due to genetic manipulation, 90 percent of broiler chickens have trouble walking.

If you are interested in learning more about the unsafe conditions in factory farms that can sicken your health, I detailed them in The Great Bird Flu Hoax expose that was a NY Times best seller last year.

On Vital Votes, reader Mary from Cabool, Missouri observes:

"Of course 'organic' factory farmed chickens would tend to be sicker than chemically raised factory farmed chickens.  You can not have healthy chickens that are raised in cages and not allowed to act as chickens. 

It increases their stress levels and makes them more prone to diseases.  However, organic to most people means no antibiotics, so the animals will be sicker because of their higher stress levels."

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