The National Chicken Council said unconfirmed data has skewed the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on foodborne illness.
The report suggests that poultry is the single leading cause of outbreaks of foodborne illnesses, held responsible for 21% of the cases. NCC says the data blames poultry for 1,355 out of 6,395 cases. Of these, 741 stemmed from a single incident in an Alabama jail in 2006, which has still not been confirmed to have been caused by poultry. Without this number, poultry would account for 641, or 10.9% of the reported incidents.
Steve Pretanik, NCC's director of science and technology, said it was unfair to present a picture that is skewed by a single event and which presents a misleading picture of the safety of poultry.