WASHINGTON - A U.S. doctors' group on Wednesday called on beef producers to voluntarily ban the practice of feeding chicken manure to cattle.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine also urged the U.S. Agriculture Department to investigate the health risks of the practice, which is most common in large poultry-producing states.
"Chicken manure is filled with the disease-causing organisms, heavy metals and veterinary drugs the chicken managed to expel," said PCRM president Dr. Neal Barnard.
"Unless the manure is carefully treated, using it in cattle feed supercharges a cow's intestinal tract with disease-causing bacteria that can be passed along to humans," he said.
The PCRM is a non-profit group that promotes preventive medicine, including vegetarianism, as the way to good health.
The group also has raised concerns about the potential for "mad cow disease" to become a problem in U.S. cattle herds, as it has been in Europe.
However, bovine spongiform encephalopathy - the scientific name for mad cow disease - has not been found so far in the United States.
Barnard co-authored an article in the current issue of Preventive Medicine which found that 18% of Arkansas chicken farmers together feed about 2.6 million lbs of chicken manure to cattle each year.
The practice is also common in other large chicken-producing states, he said.
While a temperature of 145 degrees, Fahrenheit, is required to kill some forms of salmonella bacteria, the chicken manure fed to cattle is treated in a way that the temperature rarely gets above 110 to 140 degrees, Barnard said.
A recent poll commissioned by the PCRM revealed that 72% of Americans would eat less beef or avoid it altogether if they knew it came from cattle fed on chicken manure, Barnard said.
The same poll also found that news of Hudson Foods Inc.'s 25-million-lb hamburger recall due to suspected E. coli contamination and fish kills in the Mid-Atlantic region thought to be linked to poultry waste runoff, was having an impact on consumer food-buying and eating habits, he said.
About half of those surveyed planned to take more kitchen precautions, while nine percent planned to buy less poultry, 12% planned to cut back on beef and 18% planned more vegetarian meals, Barnard said.
Chicken manure is used as a protein supplement for cattle, especially during winter when grass resources are scarce, said Chuck Lambert, chief economist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
"Outside the yuck factor, it's a sound management practice or at least it has been," Lambert said, noting that the cattle industry has relied on previous research indicating the practice is safe.
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