The Wall Street Journal reports that in May the United States Department of Agriculture allowed Tyson Foods Inc. to label its chicken "raised without antibiotics." It was a great marketing coup for the country's second largest processor of poultry. But there was one problem: Tyson's birds were still fed a diet laced with drugs called ionophores to prevent intestinal infections. On Nov. 6, the USDA said in a letter to the company that it had made a mistake, ionophores qualified as antibiotics, and requested that Tyson remove the wording to "make sure labels are truthful."
Tyson hopes to convince the USDA that ionophores are antimicrobials, not antibiotics. So far, the agency isn't buying that line. Rather than trying to change the department's position, perhaps the company would be better advised to concentrate on changing its farming practices.
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