THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Of course we will have to keep contaminated birds on the line and use deadly chemicals to disinfect them (hopefully).

The department is now poised to allow a further increase in line speeds, boosting the maximum speed by about 25 percent. This change is part of new regulations that officials say would make poultry production more efficient and transfer more responsibility for inspections to industry.

Under the new rules, which could be finalized as soon as this summer, the number of chemical treatments used on birds is also likely to further increase, according to agency documents and USDA inspectors who have worked in plants where line speeds have already accelerated.

To keep speeds up, the new regulations would allow visibly contaminated birds to remain on the lines — rather than being discarded or removed for off-line cleaning, as is now common practice. The proposed rules say “all carcasses” on the line would be treated with antimicrobial chemicals “whether they are contaminated or not.”

The heightened use of chemicals would follow a pattern that’s already emerged in poultry plants. In a private report to the House Appropriations Committee, the USDA said where plants have already accelerated line speeds, workers have been exposed to larger amounts of cleaning agents. “The use of powerful antimicrobial chemicals has increased in order to decrease microbial loads on carcasses,” according to the 2010 report, recently obtained by The Washington Post.

In interviews, more than two dozen USDA inspectors and poultry industry employees described a range of ailments they attributed to chemical exposure, including asthma and other severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes and sinus ulcers and other sinus problems.

Amanda Hitt, director of the Food Integrity Campaign with the Government Accountability Project, said her group has been collecting statements for the past two years from inspectors reporting illnesses and injuries due to chemical exposure in poultry plants where slaughter line speeds have already increased.

But why should we worry about those people? They are replaceable, profits are not.