Salmonella poisoning from chickens and eggs
Listeriosis from chicken meat
Diseased birds dying in their stalls and fed back to live birds

No wonder the poultry industry is under fire-from consumers, doctors professors, researchers. Even a government minister, Edwina Curie, lost her job in the furore. Never has there been such a high level of concern over the quality of British food. Intensive farming, on which Britain's agricultural policy has been founded since the Second World War, is again being put to the test-and found wanting. The story is the all too familiar tissue of leaks and lies, of secrets and smug complacency.

Clare Druce addresses the key issues of public concern-from the poor health and disgraceful living conditions of the birds which provide us with their eggs and meat, and the failure of government agencies to enforce the law, to the now notorious hazards to human health. Even the drug industry comes into the picture:forty-four different antibiotics are marketed to the poultry industry alone.

She also examines the evidence linking a wide range of human diseases, many of them fatal, to bacteria originating in chicken and eggs-among them meningitis, septicaemia, diarrhoea, miscarriages, and still births.

A provocative book which challenges many of our everyday assumptions about animal and human welfare, and suggests ways in which farmers, consumers and goverment can begin to put things right.

"Clare Druce would like to see chickens treated with proper respect. And I support her wholeheartedly."
Tony Soper

Did you know?

• Mass extermination of day-old chicks? Most battery farmers keep their hens for the first, most productive year only. The ugly side of egg production begins on day one, when around 50% of all chicks that struggle free of their shells are exterminated.

• Diseases of intensification? Cage layer fatigue, fatty livers, egg laying problems and tumours plague battery hens, while infectious conditions such as bronchitis can spread like wildfire in the hot conditions within units where 30,000 birds or more may be kept together in one building.

• Only happy hens lay eggs? Another piece of false information circulated by intensive egg farmers is that 'only happy hens lay eggs'. Egg laying is a sexual/biological function in no way connected with contentment.

• Campylobacter food poisoning? The most potent breeding ground for campylobacter organisms which affect man seems to be intensive broiler chicken units, where the birds pick up infection easily.

Published in 1994 by:

Green Print
10 Malden Road
London NW5 3HR
England
ISBN 1 85425 028 0