Vol. 72/No. 3      January 21, 2008

All 12 worked on the kill floor “head table” removing meat from pig heads. They developed symptoms of numbness and tingling in their arms and legs. Five of the workers have been diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, or CIDP, a rare immune disorder that can cause lasting damage.

QPP workers and others in this town of 23,000 are concerned that they are not getting the truth about the illness and what caused it. One QPP worker, who asked that her name not be used out of fear of company retaliation, said, “They don’t say what’s going on. They don’t give the information fast enough. They tell us they are not finding anything. We feel they are giving us the runaround.”

The head table workers cut meat from the pig’s head, at a rate of 1,100 pigs an hour, by first slicing off the cheek and snout meat, then inserting a nozzle into the head using compressed air to remove the brain tissue. Doctors treating the sick workers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, suspect that exposure to pig brain tissue scattered by the compressed air triggered the illness.

Beginning in December 2006, workers from the head table area who used or worked near the compressed air machine began reporting to the nursing staff at QPP, complaining of pain in their arms, hands, and legs. These workers were referred to the Mayo Clinic.

In October 2007, after seeing a cluster of cases from QPP, a Mayo Clinic doctor contacted the Minnesota Department of Health. One month later, the department officials held a press conference where state health commissioner Sanne Magnan said, “The illness is under investigation and there is no evidence the food supply has been affected.”

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, CIDP normally strikes fewer than 2 per 100,000 people. State health officials say the disease may have struck 11 out of 100 people in a particular part of the QPP plant. Minnesota state epidemiologist Ruth Lynfield said that “the patients included men and women from a range of ages and ethnicities. But they all worked in the same part of the plant, removing pig brains with compressed air.” None of the plant’s other 1,300 workers reported similar symptoms. The Star Tribune article reported, “Never before have so many cases of this type occurred in a particular locale, specific type of work, or in association with a particular animal, experts said.”

Until the illness had been made public, QPP officials took no action to protect head table workers and continued using air compressors to extract pig’s brains. As a result of the publicity QPP no longer uses compressed air and workers who butcher pig’s heads have been given additional protective clothing.

Thirty-seven year-old Susan Kruse, one of the sick workers, has worked for 15 years at QPP. In an interview at her home, she said that in November 2006 she began getting leg cramps, then pain in her arms and shoulders. By February 2007 she was confined to a wheelchair. Her doctors have told her she will not be able to return to work. It was not until this past fall, however, that she learned through the media that coworkers in her department had the same symptoms.

Kruse said for six months she went weekly to the plant to receive her short-term disability check from the company nurse. “Not once did any of the nurses tell me that other workers from the head table were having the same symptoms and were getting sick,” she said. The one thing she wanted all her coworkers to know is, “they should go to the doctor as soon as they have any symptoms and not wait like I did.”

To date none of the QPP workers have received workers’ compensation because it has yet to be proven where the illness came from. QPP is organized by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 9, as is the Hormel meatpacking plant, which sits beside it.

Carlos Samaniego contributed to this article.
 
 
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