 In 2013, Maryland became the first state to ban the feeding of an arsenic-containing drug to chickens used to control all the parasites and give their meat an appealing pink color. In 2011, FDA found that the livers of chickens fed this drug had elevated levels of inorganic arsenic, a known human carcinogen. In response, the drug's manufacturer, Pfizer, voluntarily pulled the drug off the U.S. market, although it's still sold overseas, including places that continue to export chicken back to us. And a similar arsenic-containing drug for use in poultry is still available in the United States. But at least the ban kept Maryland farmers from using stockpiles of the drug. How much arsenic gets into the actual meat, though, not just the internal organs? We didn't know until recently. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health coordinated the purchase of chicken breasts of grocery-store shelves in ten cities across the country and found 70% of samples of chicken meat from poultry producers that didn't prohibit arsenic drugs were contaminated with the cancer-causing form of arsenic at levels that exceeded the safety thresholds originally set by the FDA. That is, before they relented and admitted, there's really no safe level of this kind of arsenic. Even when the drug was first approved, scientists believed its organic arsenic base would be excreted on change, and organic arsenic is much less dangerous than inorganic arsenic. But guess what appears to convert the drug into the carcinogenic form? Cooking. When chicken meat is cooked, levels of the arsenic-containing drug go down, and levels of carcinogenic arsenic go up, suggesting that the drug may degrade into the cancer-causing inorganic arsenic species during cooking. How much cancer are we talking about? If you estimate that about three-quarters of Americans eat chickens, then the arsenic in that chicken has potentially been causing more than 100 cases of cancer every year. They conclude that eliminating the use of arsenic-containing drugs and chicken and pig production could reduce the burden of arsenic-related diseases in the US population. That's one of the ways arsenic gets into rice. When we feed arsenic to chickens to ping in their flesh, the resulting arsenic-bearing poultry manure is then introduced to the environment, the soil, the water, and then the rice can then suck it up from contaminated soil and be transferred to human beings that don't even eat chicken. We're talking massive environmental contamination from the poultry industry. Nearly 2 million pounds of arsenic has been poured into the environment every year by the chicken industry alone in the United States. And now we're even seeing arsenic in foods sweetened with organic brown rice syrup, so there's all these knock-on effects. It reminds me of the arsenic and apple juice story. Although the US made lead in arsenic-based pesticides illegal years ago, they still persist in the soil, so even organic products are not immune. Yes, there's arsenic deposits naturally found in the Earth's crust, and there's other industrial contamination and pesticide use, but arsenic-containing poultry drugs have been deliberately administered to animals intended for human consumption for 70 years. Consequently, exposures resulting from the use of these drugs are far more controllable than our exposures from environmental sources. And the good news is that thanks to a lawsuit the Center for Food Safety and other consumer groups, three out of the four arsenic-containing drugs fagged to poultry had been officially pulled from the market.