When even a live chicken poisonous!

Shoppers used to feel a sense of relief when they found signboards dangling at the entrances of some reputed kitchen markets in Dhaka city saying "Formalin-free Market". There is, alas, now hardly any market where one can find any fish, vegetables, or fruits that are not laced or impregnated with formalin. On May 25, as reported in news media, a mobile court detected formalin levels of up to 0.60 parts per million (ppm) in each fish at the Town Hall Market at Mohammadpur in Dhaka, whereas the acceptable limit is 0.01 ppm.
It was undoubtedly a laudable initiative Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI) undertook in September 2012 to make kitchen markets formalin-free with their project "Formalin and poisonous carbide-free ideal market". With support from some banks, FBCCI had supplied formalin detection kits to 11 kitchen markets in the capital city with an instruction to test formalin in fish every day and declared those markets formalin-free.
Initially there were some positive implications when market supervisors and also some young volunteers were found checking fish and vegetables with the formalin detection machines. But of late, as reported in the media, initiators of the project are wanting back the detection kits as they are not being used due to lackadaisical attitude of the market committee members, who try to blame the high cost of new filters of the detection kits for the slack in using the machine. Lack of monitoring by FBCCI and absence of strict laws are also blamed for formalin in foods not being checked, while the Formalin Control Act 2013, having provision of stringent punishment on formalin-mixers, is lying in the ministry of law for more than eight months for mere vetting.
Hundreds of reports and articles have been published in news media about the harms adulterated foods are causing. The government knows that people are dying of cancers and other ailments mainly due to adulterated food and polluted environment. The think-tankers as well as consumers' rights groups are constantly hammering in talk-shows to drive home the urgency of punishing those who are responsible for adulteration of food and medicines.
It's not that government can't help. The government has already shown how the incidence of acid-throwing at girls' faces has drastically plummeted after some culprits were hanged to death.
Is not it high time that the whole nation should stand united in the demand of unadulterated food?
Well, if we cannot rid the nation of the curse of adulteration, our scientists should be experimenting with our adulteration-tainted blood at least to find a way to create a sort of antidote that we can inject into our bodies to render us immune to the powers of formalin!
Dr. Saadat Husain, former Chairman of the Bangladesh Public Service Commission, wrote a nice article titled "Curbing adulteration, forgery, impersonation" that was published in The Financial Express on  June 03, 2014. A reader who read the write-up could get a graphical picture of how our country is engulfed by fakeries: fake orthopedic surgeon, spurious gold crests meant for foreign dignitaries, plagiarised PhD thesis, fake education certificates of all kinds, fake freedom fighters, fake identity cards, forged drivers' license, duplicate passport with superimposed photograph, fake police & RAB personnel and lastly Dr. Saadat questioned whether our jails are fake too, referring to a reported incident where an ill-reputed inmate of a jail was caught with Indian Rs 300,000 in his cell. He, however, did not go into details about all the adulterations except a cursory mention of how in old days comestibles like milk and oil were slightly adulterated.
Taking adulterated food has been so ingrained in our food habit that nowadays people don't like even to hear about it, as if, we have taken food adulteration as a kind of a fate accompli.
But the scientists, especially those who seriously care about consumers' welfare, are concerned at the magnitude and scale of how food adulteration is spreading ominously.
"The whole nation is under threat" said Abul Hossain, a chemistry professor at the University of Dhaka, who led a recent study on chicken feed based on chromium, "as chickens, the most consumed meat, and also the cheapest source of animal protein, are infused with chromium, a tannery waste product that is used to make the most popular chicken feed in Bangladesh".
The tanneries, located at Hazaribagh near Dhaka city, generate everyday about 100 tons of scraps - trimmed raw hide, flesh and fat -which are processed into feed by neighbourhood recycling plants and used in chicken and fish farms across the country.
A review by the European Food Safety Authority stated that an adult person can tolerate up to 0.25 milligrams of chromium per day, and noted that carcinogenic chromium "hexavalent" (produced as part of the industrial process) should be avoided in all foods. Mr. Abul Hossain, in his study, found carcinogenic chromium ranging from 350 to 4,520 micrograms [0.35 to 4.52 milligrams] per kg in different organs of chickens which were fed the tannery scraps feed for two months. Poultry and fish feed produced from tainted industry scraps is attractive to farmers as it is rich in protein content - and it's cheap.
The feed producers buy raw hide scraps and shaving and buffing dust from the tanneries, and soak them with lime before boiling them to make a black-coloured paste to be turned into granular feeds for chickens and fish. There is a belief among the feed producers that boiling the scraps eliminates the toxic elements from the processed feed. But, to the contrary, according to a 2013 study, boiling or sun-drying rather converts chromium more easily into the carcinogenic "hexavalent" form, also known as "Cr (VI)." The study estimated up to 25 per cent of the chickens in Bangladesh contained harmful levels of Cr (VI).
Justice M A Karim, an octogenarian, lives a solitary life at his Dhanmondi apartment. A little hypochondriac, he religiously walks by the Dhanmondi lake everyday in the morning and also in the evening. He opted not to live outside Bangladesh in spite of his daughter's insistence for his staying with her in USA. Bangladesh is a haven, Justice Karim argued while talking to me, if one does not have to worry about money to buy food and medicine. He beamed with confidence when he told me he had already learnt the secret of how to cheat the formalin-mixers in the kitchen markets. Based on his learning he advised me: "Always buy those live fish which hop and leap on the fish-seller's tray. And if you have to buy a Hilsha which doesn't bop or jump, choose at best that one which is surrounded by flies; flies never sniff at a formalin-laced fish".
I don't know how Justice Karim will now try to cheat those sellers when he would learn that a live chicken crowing loudly or a fish gliding with jerks is also full of carcinogenic poisons?
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