"Eating Outside Our Kingdom"
Although those with the most poultry exposure
appear to suffer the greatest excess mortality,
surplus cancer deaths are also found in other slaughterhouse workers,
and this research goes back decades.
Higher cancer rates in butchers, and slaughterhouse workers,
meat cutters, and those working in processing plants.
The bottom line is that it's clear from this large study
and others reported in the literature
that workers in the meat industry are at increased risk
of developing and dying from cancer.
The increased risk may be due to these animal-to-human viruses
or antigenic stimulation through chronic exposure to animal protein.
And in fact, cancer-causing virus exposure could help explain
why those who eat meat have higher cancer rates.
There's even a retrovirus associated with cancerous fish tumors,
which was speculated as a cause
for increased cancer rates in American seafood workers.
Growing up on a livestock farm is associated with
higher rates of blood-borne cancers — lymphomas and leukemias,
but growing up on a farm raising only crops was not.
Worst was growing up on a poultry farm,
consistent with chicken consumption
being most tied closely to these same cancers:
a quarter of daily chicken breast
associated with a doubling or tripling of lymphoma risk.
Researchers are finally able to start connecting the dots.
High levels of antibodies to avian leucosis/sarcoma viruses,
and reticuloendotheliosis viruses recently found in poultry workers
provides evidence of infectious exposure to these cancer-causing poultry viruses.
And some of the highest levels were found
not in like the eviscerators, the gut-pullers, or those that hang the live birds,
but just among the line workers that just cut up the final product.
In an attempt to narrow down which diseases
were associated with which meat,
researchers tried separating out
those in the pig slaughtering and pork processing.
One of the primary sources of concern
is in the use of pig organs and tissues as transplants
(which is widely practiced),
is the fear of introducing zoonotic infections.
What they're concerned about is what's called PERV transmission,
the pig-to-human transmission of porcine endogenous retroviruses,
raising theoretical concerns about cancer,
immunological, and neurological disorders.
But you don't need to get a pig valve to be exposed.
It's found in the blood of pigs,
and so people exposed to pig blood may be exposed to the virus.
The main findings unique to the pork study,
not found in beef or sheep processing,
was the significant excesses of deaths from senile conditions,
such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Reminds me of those poor pork brain extraction workers.
You think your job is bad.
How would you like to work at the head-table?
Well, that doesn't sound so bad,
until you learn it's where,
in the unbridled use of compressed air
in the pursuit of the maximum yield of soft tissues,
they blow the brains out of severed swine heads.
As the line speeds increased,
the “workers reported being unable to place the skulls"
"completely on the brain removal device"
"before triggering the compressed air,"
"causing greater splatter of brain material.”
The aerosolized "mist of brain" is blamed for dozens of cases
of inflammatory neurological disease in workers
who started with symptoms as mild as pain, tingling,
and difficulty walking and ended up
as bad as having to be put in a coma for 6 weeks,
because of unrelenting seizures.
At first they thought it was some brain parasite,
but now it's known to be an auto-immune attack
triggered by the exposure to aerosolized brain.
A similar mechanism has been blamed for meat proteins
triggering inflammatory arthritis in people eating meat.
By eating fellow animals, we are exposed
not only to fellow animal diseases, but to animal tissues
that our body may mistake as our own.
This may be an advantage to eating a more plant-based diet.
By eating outside of the animal kingdom—
dipping into the plant kingdom or fungi,
not only do we not have to worry
about getting something like Dutch elm disease,
never has an auto-immune polyradiculoneuropathy
been blamed on a head of lettuce.