Dozens of plants have been forced to temporarily halt operations amid skyrocketing numbers of cases and fatalities. According to a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 5, plant workers in 19 states had tested positive for the virus as of April Large Covid clusters have also appeared in meatpacking plants around the world, including Canada , Spain , Ireland , Brazil , and Australia. So what is it about these places that makes them such dangerous incubators for the novel coronavirus?
Like most aspects of the pandemic, this one, too, is complicated by a dearth of data. Figuring out how exactly the disease is spreading between workers and which slaughterhouse practices are to blame is going to take time and lots of epidemiological legwork. But there are some clues. A thousand people might work a single eight-hour shift, standing shoulder to shoulder as carcasses whiz by on hooks or conveyor belts. Often, workers get only a second or two to complete their task before the next hunk of meat arrives.
The frenzied pace and grueling physical demands of breaking down so many dead animals can make people breathe hard and have difficulty keeping masks properly positioned on their faces. To allow for social distancing, the agency recommended that meat processors slow down production lines to require fewer workers, and that they stagger shifts to limit the number of employees in a facility at one time. Other efforts outlined in an email Richardson sent WIRED include providing surgical masks at the start of each shift, which are now mandatory for all workers; fever screening all employees using hands-free thermometers and thermal imaging before they can enter a facility; and hiring dedicated staff for additional cleanings.
A representative from the North American Meat Institute, a trade group for US meat processors, wrote in an email that their members are all taking similar precautions and following guidelines from the CDC and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as much as possible. Those interventions should help, though not all people with Covid get fevers. Before that law was passed, meatpacking workers were sometimes asked to sign a waiver immediately after an injury.
The pressure to sign was enormous. When a worker named Duane Mullin had both of his hands crushed in a hammer mill at the Amarillo slaughterhouse now owned by Tyson, a manager employed by its previous owner persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his teeth. And workers have tested positive at the Tyson pork plant in Logansport—more than one-third of the 2, workers at the plant. Read: The supermarket after the pandemic. These shortages hardly qualify as a national emergency.
During the Second World War, government rationing limited weekly meat purchases to about two pounds a person. Today the typical American consumes about twice that amount every week. If the Greatest Generation could defeat Nazi Germany and the empire of Japan on a smaller ration of meat, we can certainly eat less of it for the time being to spare the lives of meatpacking workers and their communities.
Cattle ranchers, hog farmers, and poultry growers deserve compensation for the livestock being euthanized because of the slowdowns at slaughterhouses.
Gettysburg was the deadliest battle of the Civil War. Over the course of three days in July , almost 8, Confederate and Union soldiers were killed. Those Americans have been disproportionately elderly, poor, and people of color, too often working at low-paying jobs deemed necessary for the rest of us: meatpacking worker, restaurant worker, farmworker, delivery person, grocery clerk. Read: A guide to staying safe as states reopen. Here are the essential things that we must achieve, the very least we must do to give those deaths meaning and take care of the people who feed us:.
About two years back, four buffaloes from my village drank the drain water and died within two hours. Now we do not allow our cattle to come close to this drain. Hind Agro officials say that they are setting up a biomethanation plant of 0. The plant they claim will take care of the villagers' problems. Is there a way out With private slaughterhouses coming up in many cities, things seem to be improving. Some experts claim the private slaughterhouse at Mourigram in Kolkata set up by Fregaerio Conserva Allana Limited in has provided some respite to the city.
The fully mechanised slaughterhouse built at a cost of Rs 80 crore on an area of about 46 acre has a capacity to slaughter 1, buffaloes per day. It has an ETP to treat five lakh litres of wastewater per day and a rendering plant to process four tonnes per hour of animal waste. But residents still complain. Ravikanth, member secretary of West Bengal Pollution Control Board dismisses these complaints as "absolutely baseless".
But according to a news report, in December in The Statesman, there was an ammonia gas leak from the plant, which affected 26 people. Experts claim that Al Kabeer's slaughterhouse set up in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh is one of the best slaughterhouses in the country. The plant has a capacity to mechanically slaughter 1, animals per day and process about tonnes of meat per day.
It has set up a biomethanation plant, which treats 60 tonnes of solid waste per day and generates energy out of it. The ETP treats wastewater, which is being used for horticulture and pisiculture. Al Kabeer is selling waste products such as hair, hides, tails, horns, etc to generate revenue. The hair is sold to make toothbrushes; hides are salted and shipped to tanneries.
So the slaughterhouse is a zero waste unit. But high water consumption still remains a big problem and the Al Kabeer unit is not immune to it. It consumes about 20 lakh litres per day of water. Hind-Agro officials claim that abattoirs need to use fresh water as they are food-processing units and quality of food is important. Experts claim that there are technologies to reutilise waste from slaughterhouses -- so that it does not harm the environment. Biomethanation is a good way of treating slaughterhouse waste; it not only produces manure, but also generates energy.
Since the Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources is running a project -- development of high rate biomethanation processes as means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- to promote biomethanation in the country. It was as part of this project that Al Kabeer has set up a biomethanation plant, and Hind Agro is in the process of setting up another.
Ravi Agarwal, coordinator of New Delhi-based NGO Srishti claims that composting is also a good way of dealing with the waste coming out of slaughterhouses. At this slaughterhouse, we filmed pigs being kicked in the face, sheep being picked up and thrown, and the heads of sheep being cut off before the statutory time had elapsed — and while they were, in all probability, still alive. In January and February , we filmed at another Soil Association-accredited slaughterhouse, this time in Dorset.
Once again, the MHS was forced to take action and has begun building a case for the prosecution of at least one worker. The footage revealed still more breaches of the welfare laws, including sheep being dragged by their heads, forcibly thrown into the stun room and picked up by their fleeces and ears. Pigs and sheep suffered improper stunning. Having spent more than a year exposing poor practice and illegality in slaughterhouses, we hoped that the industry would have made significant improvements.
But we filmed sheep being decapitated whilst still alive, calves slipping and collapsing repeatedly to the floor for three hours, and goats leaping into the killing area to try to evade the stunning tongs. The ninth slaughterhouse we filmed was Cheale Meats in Essex, where the deliberate cruelty inflicted on animals was so shocking, it made the national media.
The film showed pigs being burnt with cigarettes, one animal being punched in the head, pigs being goaded in the face, regular kicks and blows, improper stunning and seriously injured pigs forced to drag themselves to slaughter. This was the first non-stun slaughterhouse we filmed. We found vicious abuse of the animals including sheep being smashed headfirst into pallets, a worker bouncing up and down on the neck of a sheep, and slaughterers hacking away at the throats of conscious sheep with a blunt knife.
0コメント