Remember that proposed US Department of Agriculture plan to speed up kill lines at factory-scale poultry slaughterhouses, and cut way back on the number of USDA inspectors to oversee them?

Part of the proposed plan involves allowing the poultry companies to ramp up the antimicrobial sprays they aim at bird carcasses as they zoom along the kill line—a chemical fix to the problem the various pathogens, antibiotic-resistant, commonly found on chicken, including salmonella and campylobacter. A recent Washington Post story by Kimberly Kindy delivers an ominous taste of what this practice could mean for both the safety of the chicken you eat and that of the workers who prep it for you.

As Kindy shows, even without the new rules in place, the “number and strength of chemicals used on poultry-processing lines is [already] increasing,” in response to a separate USDA effort to slash the pathogen load on chicken. But get this: Kindy reports that there’s mounting evidence that the chemical cascade is masking, rather than reducing, the amount of disease-causing bacteria on your supermarket bird.

Here’s how the system is supposed to work, Kindy writes:

As the chicken moves down the processing line, the bird is sprayed with, and bathed in, an average of four different chemicals. To check that most bacteria have been killed, occasional test birds are pulled off the line and tossed into plastic bags filled with a solution that collects any remaining pathogens. That solution is sent to a lab for testing, which takes place about 24 hours later. Meanwhile, the bird is placed back on the line and is ultimately packaged, shipped and sold.

Click here for the full story.