It is amazing to me that they would not use the same blood borne, air borne pathogen protection for meat processors of all kind of animals, I don't care if it is chicken, pig or cow. If it can get in your respiratory tract, on your skin or in contact with your body in anyway, 'it', whatever 'it' is can potentially cause illness.

I am appalled that these people had to work in conditions where they were breathing aerosolized tissue and had tissue all over their skin. Frankly, I am surprised the nursing staff, safety staff of the plant, and OSHA didn't figure out this was a bad idea before people got sick to begin with.

Most workplaces have instructions on how to deal with human 'messes'...procedures as to how to clean up vomit, or blood for example. Would not the same apply to animal crud?

I imagine this is quite the workers comp issue.

The other thing that bugs me is the centralized manner of food processing....thousands of animals' 'meat' gets mixed and then sent to other plants where it gets further mixed. The products from one diseased animal can conceivably end up in thousands of products worldwide these days.

The other issue you can not get around is buying local meat processed at local butchers....altho it is technically safer, as your exposure is more limited, the caveat is CWD. Most local butchers where we live, process deer. I am not sure, if the deer brains are tested for CWD prior to butchering or after butchering and dispersal of the meat. I am hoping they test the brains before, but I do not know for sure. CWD and human forms of CJD appear to be dose dependent, however, here where we live, they feel that CWD is spread via saliva, so that is hardly 'dose' dependent. This is interesting as most of these prion diseases seem to be dose dependent on the amount of neural tissue consumed or amount of neural tissue the individual is exposed to, and the route of exposure. Brain probes inserted into brain of course, is more of a high dose situation, as is eating brain, spinal cord or other neural tissue of affected animals.

You can not get prions off equipment....no how.....that is why when there is a case of human CJD, the operative equipment has to be trashed and every one who had a surgical procedure using that equipment, notified of exposure....luckily, it doesn't happen too often. Then again, we hardly have a 'handle' on CJD.

I wish we still had the family farms we used to. I have seen the decline of family farms and the rise of large corporate farms and it is just plain sad for all of us, for many reasons.

Speaking of the midwest, I am buried in a flatland avalanche right now....this is interesting. It has been a good many years since we had a winter like this.