Some Maryland lawmakers are taking another shot at prohibiting arsenic-containing drugs from being added to chicken feed, even though a Pfizer subsidiary willingly suspended sales of roxarsone — the drug at the heart of the battle — last July.
The drug was pulled from the market after the Food and Drug Administration found low levels of inorganic arsenic, a carcinogen, in the livers of chickens treated with roxarsone, which poultry farmers have used since the 1940s to fight parasitic disease and speed growth.
But Del. Tom Hucker (D-Montgomery) and Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) want Maryland to take the lead in permanently banning the drug, which retained its FDA approval even though its use was suspended. Proponents of the ban are worried the drug could be introduced.
Testifying Wednesday before the House Environmental Matters Committee, Hucker said the use of roxarsone causes traces of arsenic to end up in chicken litter and the agricultural fields where the litter is applied, accumulating in the soil over time.
“We’ve been adding 30,000 pounds of arsenic every single year to Maryland’s soil, land and air for decades,” he said, citing a report by the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology.
Officials from Maryland’s poultry industry also testified Wednesday, downplaying the seriousness of arsenic in chicken litter by observing that arsenic occurs naturally in grapes and apples. They also argued against Maryland acting before the FDA.
“We think it is inappropriate for the state of Maryland to usurp federal authority,” said Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industries.
But a representative for Gansler, Erin Fitzsimmons, said the state should lead by example.
“Sometimes state action is what’s needed to prompt a change,” Fitzsimmons told members of the committee.
Gansler and other attorneys general across the country in 2008 called on the FDA to ban the use of arsenic additives in poultry feed.
Hucker has tried repeatedly to pass legislation banning the use of roxarzone and other arsenic additives by Maryland’s chicken farmers. Last year, the bill faltered in committee before it could come to a vote.
Hucker blames that failure on “an all-star team of corporate lobbyists” who “did a very good job of confusing the committee.”
He said he thinks this year’s bill, which he co-sponsored with 21 other Democrats, has a better chance because legislators will see that the suspension of roxarsone has not slowed chicken farming, Maryland’s biggest agricultural sector.
“While they claimed last year that this would be terribly damaging to them if they were not able to access this drug, in fact they’re all managing their flocks successfully now without it. They’re living without arsenic,” Hucker said.
Hucker also said the Salisbury-based chicken processing company Perdue, Maryland’s biggest chicken producer, has managed without roxarsone, which it decided to stop using in 2007.
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