Not everyone sickened by mysterious neurological illnesses at three Midwest slaughterhouses was counted among the ill.
Twenty-one workers from Austin, Minnesota's Quality Pork Processor and three from Indiana Packers Corp. in Delphi, Indiana were studied for a scientific paper in the Lancet Neurology scientific journal.
Free medical care was offered to patients whose insurance did not cover treatment and three made the trip from Indiana to Rochester for study, said Dr. Dan Lachance, a Mayo Clinic neuologist and co-author of the paper.
Several workers there had the illness, he said, but did not participate in the study. Some people were likely affected but did not come forward, or physicians were unable to prove a connection.
“Several of those were likley undocument workers who did not want to come forward — and that may have been especially true in Indiana,” Lachance said.
One worker, he said, developed neurologic symptoms after he started military boot camp. A military neurologist disqualified him from duty.
“So they sent him home and by the time he got home he had no job, no resources and by the time he retained an attorey who would take the time to take his case, and he got sent to Austin Medical Center and Mayo for me to see him, all of his symptoms had improved and all evidence for this had gone away and so I was never really able to prove anything. But he’s an example of someone who I suspected was a case but wasn’t able to prove,” Lachance said.
The bodies of affected workers produced a systemic response of the immune system to pig nervous system compenents in the brain mist.
“And the individual’s immune system is reacting to these components and because these components in pigs bear quite a similarilty to the same components in our own nervous systems the immune attack caused illness,” Lachance said.
Autoimmune illnesses often have an unknown trigger, he said. But in this case, researchers may eventually track down exactly what caused the slaughterhouse workers to get sick.
Laboratory tests underway at Columbia University could shed more light upon what specific constituents in the brain tissue triggered the illnesses, said Dr. Aaron DeVries, medical epidemiologist for the Minnesota Department of Health and one of several co-authors of the paper. The Lancet article, he said, is important because it provides a clear description of the clinical illness.
It’s a condition that directly affected worker safety, Osterholm said.
“Clearly that particular process is one that is real, not a potential, but a real occupational risk,” he said.
Osterholm said there is “clear and compelling evidence” that there is no longer any risk of new cases.
“As soon as this procedure stopped, cases stopped,” he said.
As a result, researchers have come to a conclusion that any slaughterhouse can put to immediate use.
“Our advice is that using compressed air to remove brain is not recommended,” DeVries said.
Patients studied for the Lancet were diverse, including 76 percent Hispanic, 19 percent white and 5 percent black. They ranged in age from 20 to 54 and were about half male and half female<---52 percent.
Most affected patients required treatment. All improved, though not completely, either spontaneously or with treatment, Lachance said.
Workers at the slaughterhouses had been harvesting brains for human consumption in dishes such as eggs-and-brains and brains-and-gravy.
Their immune response was “correlated directly” with exposure to brain tissue. All 24 affected workers studied had painful neuological symptoms. There were more than 24 workers who got sick, Lachance said, but some didn’t come forward because their symptoms were mild.
But symptoms worsened for those workers who were re-exposed after temporary removal from brain harvest jobs when symptoms sent them home.
Pulse on Health
By Jeff Hansel, member Association of Health Care Journalists
Health Reporter for the Post-Bulletin newspaper, 18 1st Ave. S.E. in Rochester, Minnesota 55904
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