Sushanta k singha:
A professor from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Dhaka claimed that poultry feed in Bangladesh was being made from leather sourced from Hazaribagh. The claim became even more serious when an investigation revealed that the professor had never previously conducted research on poultry feed and, by his own admission, did not have a clear understanding of poultry feed or the ingredients used to produce it.
The investigation found that the experiment behind his claim was conducted on only two chickens. The researcher himself acknowledged that he had collected leather dust from Hazaribagh, mixed it with food, and fed the mixture to the chickens. One of the chickens died within just 15 days after being fed leather dust directly.
Before conducting the experiment, he had tested the leather dust collected from Hazaribagh and found that it contained a high level of chromium. However, a crucial point is that he did not feed the chickens any commercial poultry feed. He also stated that he had no clear understanding of what ingredients are used in the production of poultry feed.
Even more importantly, he could not confirm whether leather dust from Hazaribagh was actually used in poultry feed in Bangladesh. His position was that he had heard that leather dust was used in poultry feed, but he was not certain whether it was actually being used.
This raises a fundamental question: How scientifically valid is it to make sweeping claims that poultry feed contains cancer-causing substances without testing any commercial poultry feed? In response to a journalist’s question, he admitted that he had no knowledge of poultry feed and had not fed the chickens any commercial poultry feed. Instead, he had conducted an experiment by mixing leather dust with food and feeding that mixture to the chickens.
Professor Mohammad Abul Hossain also claimed that poultry chickens are fed sugar. He even stated that consuming poultry meat could cause diabetes in humans.
These statements were presented in a manner that suggested they were the findings of research conducted on Bangladesh’s poultry-feed industry. However, the scope of the experiment was extremely limited compared with the size and complexity of the country’s poultry industry.
Bangladesh produces approximately 16,500 tonnes of poultry feed every day through around 250 modern feed mills. Yet none of these commercially produced feeds was used in his experiment. At the same time, more than 2.4 million poultry chicks are produced every day in Bangladesh.
Given the enormous scale and complexity of the poultry industry, questions arise as to how scientifically reasonable it is to make broad claims about the entire sector based on an experiment involving only two chickens. There are also significant questions concerning the methodology of the research.
Instead of examining the actual commercial poultry-feed production system, its raw materials, and commercially manufactured feed, the experiment involved feeding chickens a mixture containing leather dust. The findings were then generalized to make broad statements about poultry feed in Bangladesh. Based on the information uncovered in the investigation, this generalization is highly questionable.
I brought these claims and the inconsistencies surrounding the research to public attention through my investigative report broadcast on Jamuna Television on October 29, 2019.
The claims subsequently created widespread confusion among people across the country. The central question was how the results of a limited experiment involving chickens fed food mixed with leather dust could be presented as evidence about an entire country’s poultry-feed industry.
This incident therefore raises questions not only about the research findings themselves, but also about the scope of the research, its methodology, the evidentiary basis for its conclusions, and the extent to which those conclusions were generalized beyond the evidence available.
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