Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at it again

The “they” are six researchers at The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, based at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences.  The “it” is another attempt to alarm citizens with false and misleading information in an attempt to block another new chicken farm in Maryland.  The “it” is contained in a letter to one Jennifer Feindt, a Farm Loan Specialist with the USDA Farm Service Agency. But this time around they really have “egg” all over their collective faces. You see, the proposed farm will be a dairy farm converted to a chicken farm to raise broilers for Perdue Farms.  Most of the misleading misinformation in the letter is about the issue of antibiotic resistance and how modern farming practices are endangering health and causing expensive hospitalizations. They must not know that Perdue Farms has pledged to have over 95 percent of their chickens raised without antibiotics. OOPS! They must not know that this proposed chicken farm will be all organic, no antibiotics and no chemicals. Double OOPS!! They trot out the old 80 percent number of antibiotics sold are for use in animals, but worse yet they state that “A growing body of evidence provides support that pathogens can be found in and around broiler operations.”  I do not know what the growing body of evidence is, as anyone with any kind of a health background and most others know there are pathogens everywhere such as the Staph aureus living on your skin and in your nasal cavity; some of it is even MRSA.