Utah children ill from arsenic-laced backyard chicken feed

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SALT LAKE CITY - Christina McNaughton wasn't sure where to begin looking when worrisome levels of arsenic turned up in two Utah County children last summer. The family's water wasn't contaminated. Not the soil either.

The trail eventually led McNaughton, a toxicologist for the Utah Department of Health, to the family's backyard chicken coop -- along with the eggs that came out of it, the feed that went into the hens that laid them and, finally, widely used animal-feed additives containing arsenic.

"For everyone who has backyard chickens," said McNaughton, "this is an issue."

But the Utah study goes far beyond a Mapleton chicken coop. The use of roxarsone and other arsenic-based additives in poultry and swine feed is at the center of a national controversy.

"Because we've turned a blind eye to what we put in our animal feed, we're putting our children at risk," said David Wallinga, director of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, an organization that is petitioning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban the arsenic additives.

The Intermountain Farmers Association, which sells the feed the Mapleton family had fed its hens from the start, strongly disputes the health department's findings and is asking the agency to retract its study, said Layne Anderson, vice president for agricultural operations.

He said there is no roxarsone -- nor any other arsenic-containing additive -- in the co-op's feed. In fact, there's none at any of its facilities in five states, Anderson said.

"It's not in there," he said of the company's chicken feed. "The levels of arsenic would be much higher if that was in it."

He said the arsenic found in the feed tested at the Health Department reflects nothing more than background levels, and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

"I'm concerned if there's arsenic in our customers' bodies," he added, "but it's not coming from our feed."

While the Utah Health Department has no position on the petition, it does stand by its findings -- the first of their kind -- that arsenic from feed is winding up in eggs and the people who eat them.

McNaughton first heard from the Mapleton mother last spring, after tests showed her children's urine contained excessive levels of arsenic. "She called me desperate that someone help her," recalled McNaughton.

While the children hadn't shown symptoms of arsenic poisoning, the daughter had double the arsenic deemed toxic, her son was 75 percent above the limit, and no one, including the poison-control center, could figure out why.

The mother had the water and soil tested, but those levels were about one-fifth the arsenic levels allowed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So, she and McNaughton studied a list of foods the children eat. They zeroed in on eggs.

"Her kids liked eggs a lot," said McNaughton, noting they each consumed about a dozen a week from the family's backyard chickens.

A little research of the scientific literature suggested the link between the arsenic, the eggs and the feed. The American Chemical Society had noted that about 70 percent of U.S. broilers were fed roxarsone, the most widely used arsenic-based additive, according to McNaughton's study.

And, although the poultry industry and regulators insist that virtually all of the additive is excreted, studies by Wallinga's center in 2004 showed that all of the fast-food chicken the think tank tested contained elevated levels of arsenic.

The FDA approved the use of roxarsone and its cousins in the mid-1940s, and Wallinga's group estimates the agriculture industry uses up to 2.2 million pounds a year in the production of about 43 billion pounds of poultry meat. It's combined with antibiotics to help chickens fend off diseases and grow bigger and tastier.

Meanwhile, in the environmental health arena, concern about arsenic has been growing. High arsenic levels have been associated with cancer of the skin, bladder, kidney, liver and lungs, as well as immune system, endocrine and neurological problems.

The EPA has responded to the growing body of science by banning arsenic as a wood preservative and in pesticides. Regulators also slashed the levels of arsenic allowed in drinking water to concentrations of no more than 10 parts per million.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), the EPA's toxics laboratory, gave the Utah Health Department a grant to test eggs from the Mapleton family's hens, as well as the feed they were eating.

The state turned up arsenic concentrations of 1.9 parts per million in the feed and 0.055 ppm in the eggs. Although the FDA allows almost 10 times more arsenic in eggs than the health department measured, the children who ate the tainted eggs developed levels considered toxic by the ATSDR.

And once the children stopped eating the family's eggs, and once the chickens were given arsenic-free feed to eat, contamination levels declined, follow-up tests showed.

"We tested regular grocery store eggs," McNaughton added, "and they did not have any arsenic."

McNaughton acknowledged that her agency did not test specifically for roxarsone.

"It doesn't matter where the arsenic is coming from," she said. "It's high enough to exceed the maximum risk level."

She also noted that her agency is not advocating that people drop IFA chicken feeds. It just wants people to know that if their young children eat a lot of eggs -- two a day or more -- that arsenic can increase to levels of concern.

"It's a very small part of the population," she said, noting that adults and children eating fewer eggs would not be harmed by the levels found in their study. "We want people to be educated."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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