I read News of the Weird every week. Most of the time it’s just funny little stories, but this one isn’t funny, it’s a bit scary.
I know there is a hog form of mad cow disease.
Why isn’t this story all over the news?
I think there was a thread on it a few months back - As I understand it, the problem here was that these people were inhaling aerosolised brains at a far higher level and duration of exposure than normal, making the occurrence of illness somewhat less than surprising.
There’s a phrase that should never happen.
A few weeks ago, the same thing happened in a pork packing plant in Delphi, Indiana. I’m rather confused about the nature of the illness.
Did the workers get a neurological illness the hogs had? Supposedly, pigs can’t get Mad Cow/Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy/BSE, so what is this illness?
Workers in the kill rooms of at least three pork packing plants have gotten sick from the same thing. Have the rest of the nation’s plants done anything to prevent it?
No one quite knows what the illness is.
Link to article from the StarTribune.
Unless maybe you’re developing a room fragrance and your target market is the undead.
band name!
Alternatively:
It could also be something external to the pigs, like a chemical used near the compressor intakes so that they inhale a lot of the chemical over time. Something like the specific make of gun might have a chemical that leaches out of the materials of the gun they are using. Maybe it’s a suit they all wear that the other’s don’t. The sick ones could all be doing a home remedy that is supposed to keep you from heaving when your smell the room.
The (possible) human equivalent is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. There is no proven link, but the diseases are similar.
This is from fisha’s link:
I can’t quote the whole thing here. It answers several questions, but brings up a few more.
“What do you do at the piggy plant, Daddy?”
“I blow their brains out, Lewis.”
Excellent idea. I would think the undead would be as interested in room fragrance as the rest of us. They already have their own music and TV shows, as well as their own political party. Why not fragrance?
Don’t they wear masks?
I blew that pig’s mind.
At the local Chinese Super-88, I saw ‘pigs brains’ for sale. Next time I want to aerosolize them I’ll reconsider.
When I die, I Sooo wanna be Aerosolized!
In as much as this is disturbing news, don’t prion based brain wasting diseases have incubation periods on the order of decades? This article describes it as chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. According to Wikipedia , the pathologic hallmark of the disease is loss of the myelin sheath of the peripheral nerves.
I know absolutely nothing about neurological disease, but this sounds nothing like mad cow disease. I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in 10 years, and he said that he had a similar disease that caused demyelinating of the neural sheath and that he couldn’t even masturbate (in his marvelously eloquent fashion). I think he did some sort of steroid therapy and is fine now.
I’m sure someone who actually has some expertise will wander by, but the fixation on mad cow disease seems premature.