Jim Perdue, good arsenic, and bad arsenic: By Ray Wallace

“Four out of 10 consumers have lost trust in food. Forty percent of consumers don’t trust the food supply that feeds them,” Jim Perdue said....

Perdue Farms originally used a chemical compound to treat a parasite in the chickens’ gut. The compound contains arsenic, and even though the company spent two years explaining to consumers that there was “good arsenic and bad arsenic,” the perception was too strong.

-- From “Perdue Chairman: Dealing With Perception is Good Business,” by Jennifer Merritt, at this April 12, 2014 Lancaster Farming site:

http://www.lancasterfarming.com/news/southeedition/-Perdue-Chairman--Dealing-With-Perception-is-Good-Business--#.U10a7l5H38s

Arsenic may be "natural," but that doesn't mean it's good for you. A study in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives:

revealed that chickens likely raised with arsenic-based drugs yield meat that has higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen that has also been associated with cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cognitive deficits and adverse pregnancy outcomes....

By 2010, 88 percent of all chickens raised for human consumption in the US were given the arsenic-based drug roxarsone....

When you feed arsenical drugs to livestock, the arsenic doesn't just magically disappear. Instead, trace amounts of arsenic fed to chicken are excreted in their manure -- and when hundreds of thousands of chickens are raised on a factory farm year after year, the arsenic can accumulate pretty quickly, eventually contaminating soil, groundwater and surface waters.

But not all the arsenic is excreted in manure; some portion also ends up in the poultry meat that U.S. consumers eat every day....

In meat samples containing roxarsone, levels of inorganic arsenic were four times higher than levels in organic chicken....

70 percent of samples from conventional producers without policies prohibiting arsenical use had inorganic arsenic levels that exceeded the ... FDA safety standard....

Cooked chicken samples had higher levels of inorganic arsenic than their uncooked counterparts.

-- From “The Arsenic in Your Chicken,” by Chris Hunt, at this May 13, 2013 Huffington Post site: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-hunt/arsenic-in-chicken_b_3267334.html