An Aerosol of Brain Matter

Raj — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:26:47 -0700

New Scientist this week tells of one of the new horrors found in the industrial food processing industry. It affects those workers in slaughterhouses who work on swine heads (in an area known, and you decide if this is dark comedy or not, as "the head table").

In order to remove the brains, which are then canned and exported as a pink pig-food, workers use high pressure jets of compressed air. The process results in "an aerosol of brain matter that workers may inhale." ... read more »

Bird Flu: An Update

Raj — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:55:17 -0700

It's been a while since we had a post mentioning bird flu, but in the past couple of days, folk've written in with avian influenza news. So it seems appropriate to acknowledge, first, that bird flu is alive and killing people - over 100 in Indonesia (out of 124 cases - those aren't good odds). But it's also spreading dangerously through India, in West Bengal. The Times of India quotes Mamata Banerjee even going so far as to say that it's "man-made" and part of a concerted strategy to destroy the rural economy. ... read more »