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— By Kiera Butler
Mother Jones| Mon Aug. 1, 2011 2:30 AM PDT
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/07/chickens-cancer
Last week, researchers from New Zealand published a paper that showed that kids raised on livestock farms had an elevated risk of developing blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma later in life. It didn't take long for the news of this finding to make it around the world. On Friday, an MSN Health News headline proclaimed, "Growing Up Near Livestock Tied to Blood Cancers." Whoa now, I thought. Near livestock? Plenty of people grow up in the general vicinity of farms. And given the growing popularity of urban agriculture, even city kids could be exposed to livestock on their very own block!
But before you forbid your kids to visit the petting zoo, let's take a closer look at the study. The researchers analyzed death certificates for more than 100,000 New Zealanders between the ages of 35 and 85, from 1998 and 2003, cross referencing cause of death with parents' occupation. If the deceased person had a parent who was, say, a poultry farmer, the researchers took that to mean that the person grew up on a poultry farm. The team found that subjects whose parents were livestock farmers were 22 percent more likely than those whose parents weren't farmers to develop blood cancer as adults. The finding was especially pronounced among children of poultry farmers, whose blood cancer rate was three times that of their non-farm-kid peers.
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