For workers and society at large

The lack of respect that the meat and dairy industry shows nonhuman animals also gets shown toward humans. Many industry workers are exploited because they are undocumented workers and the companies use this to take advantage. Many workers are put in dangerous situations and taken care of poorly after being injured. Further, the desensitization that workers must undergo toward the animals often follows them home, with increased domestic violence. Strange illnesses keep cropping up that are linked to eating nonhuman animals: SARS, avian flu, Ebola, Mad Cow, etc. Check back as we compile more and more examples.

Inhaling pig brains linked to slaughterhouse sickness

Click here for the full Washington Post story about pig brains getting inhaled by slaughterhouse workers and causing a mystery illness. This is an excerpt:


The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely.

While the illness is similar to some known conditions, it does not match any exactly. Nor is the leading theory of its cause something medical researchers have studied. That is because the illness appears to be caused by inhaling microscopic flecks of pig brain.

"This appears to be something new," Minnesota's state epidemiologist, Ruth Lynfield, said last week.

The packing house, in Austin, Minn. (pop. 23,000), slaughters 1,900 pigs a day, working two meat-cutting shifts and one clean-up shift. Virtually everything is used, including ears, entrails and bone. The 12 sufferers of the neurological illness -- most are Hispanic immigrants -- all work at or near the "head table" where the animals' severed heads are processed.

One of the steps in that part of the operation involves removing the pigs' brains with compressed air forced into the skull through the hole where the spinal cord enters. The brains are then packed and sent to markets in Korea and China as food.

Investigators say there is no reason to suspect that either the brains or the pork cuts were contaminated. Their working hypothesis is that the harvesting technique -- known as "blowing brains" on the floor -- produces aerosols of brain matter. Once inhaled, the material prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that attack the pig brain compounds, but apparently also attack the body's own nerve tissue because it is so similar.

If this theory is correct, the ailment -- for the moment called "progressive inflammatory neuropathy" -- resembles Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune condition that sometimes follows fairly benign infections, particularly those caused by an intestinal bacterium called Campylobacter. In the Minnesota cases, however, there appears to be no germ involved.

Although far from proved, the theory makes enough sense that the Centers for Disease Control and Infection, in Atlanta, has cast a net to about 25 other large-scale pig slaughterhouses in 13 states, seeking other cases. ...

A huge number of lab studies are underway that are likely to shed light on the biological mechanisms of the illness. A harder question to answer may be: Why now?


Kelly Wadding, 55, started as a floor worker in 1970. He now owns and manages the company. He says it has been harvesting pig brains since 1998, using the same method and the same 70-pound pressure air hose.


"That is the million-dollar question," he said last week.

Mad Cow in humans may be underreported in U.S.

Click here to read the full story by Dr. Michael Greger, complete with footnotes. This is an excerpt:


Given the new research showing that infected beef may be responsible for some sporadic CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease], thousands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year. 


Nobel Laureate Gajdusek, for example, estimates that 1% of people showing up in Alzheimer clinics actually have CJD. At Yale, out of a series of 46 patients clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's, six were proven to have CJD at autopsy. In another study of brain biopsies, out of a dozen patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's according to established criteria, three of them were actually dying from CJD. An informal survey of neuropathologists registered a suspicion that CJD accounts for 2-12% of all dementias in general. Two autopsy studies showed a CJD rate among dementia deaths of about 3%. A third study, at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that 5% of patients diagnosed with dementia had CJD. Although only a few hundred cases of sporadic CJD are officially reported in the U.S. annually, hundreds of thousands of Americans die with dementia every year. Thousands of these deaths may actually be from CJD caused by eating infected meat.