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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.
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.