BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A retired chicken inspector from Guntersville with 44 years in the poultry industry has

to stop expansion of a program that speeds up chicken conveyer lines on the grounds that it is leading to contaminated poultry.

"I have seen contaminated chickens go down the line, but inspectors like me were able to stop them before they reached consumers," said Phyllis McKelvey in a press release from Change.org. "But under the USDA plan, I'm afraid that the birds covered in bile, feces, and pus will become chicken nuggets and be served to young children."

The pilot program that concerns McKelvey is commonly called

. According to

, the new program would remove "most USDA inspectors from the plant, and largely turning line inspection over to the company themselves."

According to ABC News, the new program would replace four inspectors looking at 35 birds a minute with one inspector looking at 175 birds per minute.

"If you knew an inspector had just one-third of a second to inspect a chicken for a whole host of problems, would you eat it?" McKelvey asks in the press release.

McKelvey's petition had about 173,000 signatures as of Thursday afternoon.

In

, McKelvey said she feels obligated to speak out because she is a mother of three and a grandmother of eight.

Efforts to obtain an immediate response from the USDA have been unsuccessful.