One of the negative clichés of motorway driving is getting stuck behind a fowl-smelling chicken truck. Now, scientists have semi-conclusive proof that this sort of experience could harm not only your nerves and sense of smell, but also your health.

According to researchers Anna Rule, Ellen Silbergeld and Sean Evans from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, if you find yourself facing the rear end of a truck loaded with live chickens, you may be the unwilling recipient of a drug-resistant bacteria cocktail. The danger is especially great if it happens to be summer and you have the windows of your car wide open.

The scientists tried to recreate the exact conditions of the get-stuck-behind-chicken-truck experience, so they followed one at a distance of two or three car lengths, for 17 miles. The experiment took place in the Delmarva Peninsula, a coastal junction between Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, where many broiler chickens are raised and roads are constantly fraught with trucks carrying them from farms to the slaughterhouse.

After examining the air samples taken from the cars’ interiors, and from frequently touched parts of the car such as the door handle, the researchers found out they were riddled with an abnormal concentration of bacteria. What complicates things is that about 20 percent of these were able to shrug off antibiotics.

And that’s because the chickens themselves are treated with antibiotics; as a matter of fact, things have been done this way in the broiler chicken industry for almost 40 years now. But this is not the first time concerns were raised regarding this practice. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (an independent group looking into the intricacies of farm animal industry), had already warned about the very same thing: spreading drug resistant bacteria as a by-product of administering antibiotics to chickens.

Even if researcher Anna Rule expressed her hope that producers “do something about that”, such a thing seems far from happening soon; the official reaction of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc. was more than cold, according to The Baltimore Examiner.