 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. Hired 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 is 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, 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 or coma 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 unlike the eviscerators, the gut pollers, 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 the use of pig organs and tissues as transplants in humans, 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 six weeks because of unrelenting seizures. At first I thought it was some brain parasite, but now it's known to be an autoimmune attack triggered by the exposure to aerosolized brain. Similar mechanism has been blamed for meat proteins triggering inflammatory arthritis and people eating meat. See, 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 autoimmune polyridiculoneuropathy been blamed on a head of lettuce.