Stealthy drug-evading bacteria with heightened virulence and ability to infect humans have turned up in chickens in India, scientists said, indicating an “alarming” consequence of the nation’s fast-growing poultry industry and the misuse of antibiotics.

Eleven percent of chickens sampled at fresh produce markets around the southern city of Hyderabad carried a multidrug-resistant form of a bacteria commonly found in birds and known to sicken people, a study found. The supergerms were detected in both intensively farmed broilers and free-range fowl, and were capable of thwarting routine antibiotics, scientists from the University of Hyderabad and the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin said.

The finding suggests contaminated meat may be spreading superbugs through the food chain and the environment, potentially causing hard-to-treat infections in people. Farms supplying India’s biggest poultry-meat companies routinely use antibiotics classified by the World Health Organization as “critically important” as a way of staving off disease, a months-long investigation by Bloomberg News in the Hyderabad region this year showed.

“Our findings provide scientific support to what is known about the use of antibiotics in the food-animal sector amid a lack of a properly enacted antibiotics policy in this country,” said Niyaz Ahmed, a senior author on the paper, which was published Nov. 4 in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, in an e-mail.