Warning…this post is probably not for the squeamish of stomach… 

Seeing this one coming should have been…well…a no-brainer… 

Fittingly, the first person to detect a faint signal in all the noise was the interpreter.

The 33-year-old woman who worked for eight years working with Spanish-speaking patients at a medical clinic in southern Minnesota noticed something familiar as she translated the story of a young meatpacker last September.

Earlier last summer, she had heard a version of it from two other workers at the same slaughterhouse, and had told it to their doctors, who were different from her current patient’s. When the consultation was over, she pointed this out.

The interpreter’s insight set in motion a story, still unfolding, that may be making envious the ghost of Berton Roueche, the legendary chronicler of medical mysteries at the New Yorker magazine. A new disease has surfaced in 12 people among the 1,300 employees at the factory run by Quality Pork Processors about 100 miles south of Minneapolis.

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.

Now…why would workers at a meat processing plant be inhaling pig brains…you ask?  And why hasn’t something like this turned up before among meat factory workers?  Something must have changed.

And indeed it has…

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.

Black lung disease.  Flock worker’s lung.  All the various aliments that arise from inhaling solvents.  Christ…second hand smoke for God’s sake!  It’s not as though businesses aren’t well aware by now that when the workplace generates a lot of crap in the air, workers get sick unless they’re wearing some kind of protection.  But no.  Here’s a brand new Cost Effective way of quickly getting the brains out of pigs so they can be sold at market, and no one apparently wondered what spewing atomized brain tissue from hundreds of pigs every day into the factory air might do to the workers.

This is why there need to be unions.  And governmental oversight of the workplace.  Because somebody needs to think about this.  The boys in the front office sure as hell won’t.  Safety measures cost money after all.