Biosecurity

37 Replies to “Biosecurity”

1. No SWINE FLU in Canada…!
   They shower & sauna in the barn… 🙂
   Canadians have cleaner bacon.

   The Schweinehunds on the otherhand…

   “SCHWEINHUND” in Cantonese (豬狗)
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oVgdESw6-s

   Cheers

   Hans Rupprecht – Commander in Chief
   Army Group “True North”
   1st Saint Nicolaas Army

   1. I’m really enjoying your talents these days. Keep it coming.

2. The first time I flew Qantas to Sidney Aust….Haft hour before landing the Steward’s came through the cabin spraying Aerosol Cans in both hands….Thought they were going to herd us through sheep dip….Nope…
   I think they always followed that Protocol

   1. This was a common practice on AC (and Air Jamaica) flights arriving in Canada from Caribbean countries in the 70s and 80s. It may still be. I haven’t travelled to that part of the world in decades.
      This spraying elicited many accusations of racism from the residents of those countries.

3. Back in my hog farming days as a kid, there was a TGE virus going around. Very lethal.

   We took great pains to ensure no outside influences got into the barn.

   One day a couple of corporate guys came out, and for some dumb reason we had them change everything but their shoes. They came into the barn for a short time.

   We got the TGE in our barn after that and lost hundreds of litters.

   Took a couple of months of constant disinfecting to get free of it.

   I remember the first litter that survived and what a joyous occasion that was.

   Turns out the corporate guys had visited an infected farm earlier that day.

   1. Well, I don’t want to live like those pigs do. Or treat every place I go like a pig barn. I’m not peta by any means, but factory farming and what I grew up with are very different. The beef I buy is grass fed, and the eggs are from my own chickens.

      1. That’s very good for you, but without factory farming, three quarters of the world population would starve.

      2. It’s also illegal to sell pork that has not been raised in a sterile manner. The days of having a pig pen and “slopping” for their feed are long gone.
         Back before it was illegal we brought rotten grain over to the neighbour’s hogs. There were a couple of cow carcasses already in there. One hog dug out a beef kidney, hauled it over to the grain and rolled it around before consuming it.
         It’s because hogs eat like humans that these measures are in place. It’s also why pork is not kosher.

         1. One hog dug out a beef kidney, hauled it over to the grain and rolled it around before consuming it.

            Meh. I’ll be impressed when he dredges it in free range eggs and flash fries it in herb butter.

      3. My old neighbour long departed told me that when they mechanized (bought their first tractors) horse meat was trading at .01/lb.
         They took their horses into the pig pen and shot them. The pigs took care of ’em.

4. This is a statement about how much (society) cares about old people. While you can talk about ‘government setting standards’, and ‘who is going to pay for this’; the elephant in the room is the diversity of cultures, where we embrace cultures that, say, do not wash their hands after making your submarine sandwich; and whose celebration of feces hands is supported by a Human Rights Commission. You cannot solve this problem without being called raycissist. People are going to die; discussion will be suppressed by the feces hand celebrating media; and business owners will find themselves penalized with fines and reputation smearing for taking corrective action.

   1. The last time I got norovirus, the Subway Sandwich was made by a very nice White Minnesotan German Catholic lady. I was violently sick for a week, at Christmas time. Bad sanitation habits can come in all races, creeds, and colors.

      I knew the damned virus was spreading in my area, but I stupidly decided to buy a cold cut sandwich anyway. That was ten years ago. I think of it as a learning experience.

      Another learning experience is never buying anything at a popular national burrito restaurant, except that was learning from others, and not painful personal experience. Ditto the raw spinach leaves and romaine lettuce, no matter how healthy and nutritious they are, E. Coli Contamination is not healthy or nutritious.

      1. Anybody of any race can be unconscious. I was lined up at an ice cream parlour. The person dipping ice cream for cones coughed into her gloved hand. I asked “where are your packaged ice cream bars?” and went and got one from the freezer.

         That said, the Whu Flu seems to be a fat shaming little bug. In addition to old, sick people it seems to be lethal to young, fat ones. In an interview with a physician talking about turning ventilator patients into the prone position he said it takes a lot of people with these patients weighing 300 pounds.

      2. Noro is highly transmissible it can even spread through the air. There’s a reason it tears through cruise ships.

5. My wife’s cousin used to run a small (2000 head) pig farm in northern Jutland. Their property was a 19th Century traditional brick farmhouse with small brick barns…from the outside. Inside, the barns had been retrofitted with an airlock and decontamination system so that animals being sent for slaughter could not transmit anything from the farm to the abattoir truck or vice-versa. Blew my mind. One of the many reasons that wet markets and other substandard third-world sanitation practices do not belong anywhere near the supply chains of first-world countries.

6. There is little doubt now that elder care homes are unsafe places to live. Clearly, no one in our society values and is willing to pay for elder health care. We have well paid inspectors for pig farms, but no valid protocols for elder care facilities. Most likely, the lowly paid workers in most centers use public transportation to get to work, but we know that a bus is a fantastic way to spread a virus.

7. We used to look after our elderly parents, but, things have changed. My parents looked after their parents. Their parents looked after their parents. My brother and his family, proximity was the reason, looked after our parents until constant medical care was needed. Now it seems to have become a warehousing circumstance. Government is not your friend.

   1. Yes, my 1913 Calgary born mom had live-in care to her end of life. She had a feisty personality, so we had to help her slowly to adapt to accept in-home paid help from nice people. And she did, after she lost her personality due to mini-strokes. None of we three kids could have done that final care ourselves, and I know that my two kids can not do it for me, either.

      For corona virus three, I will likely be a victim in some lower mainland care facility.

      1. L, based on what I have read about the protocols surrounding care of seniors who get the virus, I, because of my age will be allowed to die if hospitalization becomes necessary.

      2. Well my 1913 born mother had great care in two different “elder care” homes in Calgary spanning the years 1998 until her death in 2012. Her sister also had great care at her home which also was in Calgary.
         Also her medical care was good, including two knee replacements and a hip replacement.
         All the bitching on this site is a pain at times!!

   2. Things sure have changed. As a child, I remember my great-grandmother living with us for a short time to give my grandmother a short break from taking care of her. My mother had five kids under ten years of age but that’s what families did back then.

      What amazes me right now in the midst of this Wuhan flu is how all of a sudden everyone is so concerned with our elderly in long-term care facilities. I spent the past 3-1/2 years visiting my mom in LTC and it’s heart-rending the number of residents who are alone and/or forgotten. My mom passed on January 1st and, as much as I miss her, I am relieved she is not in LTC at this time. I could not bear to be separated from her at this time.

8. We can and should up our game in all aspects of sanitation.
   But then choices have to be made because there is only one taxpayer.
   I say we take it out of the education budgets, primarily the salaries of teachers and professors, but also by elimination of their numbers through E learning and by allowing people to divert their education dollars to charter schools or home school.
   The freed up billions per year can be left in the taxpayers wallet so they can better afford to ensure that their elderly loved ones get grade A care and that they can as well when the time comes.
   One can dream…

   1. If you look at the rising costs of health care and higher education (I use the term loosely) it tracks the increasing numbers of administrators in both systems. If you eliminate the root cause of the numbers of administrators you could likely reduce the costs without degrading the outcomes.

      Some of the streamlined decision making in the FDA during the Whu Flu scare are real learning opportunities that it is possible to protect the public without constipating the decision making process.

      Wouldn’t hurt to torch the syllabus of grievance studies either, of course. 🙂

9. This is that what I have been screaming about, for years. The lethal pandemic has to strike, for someone to notice.

10. W/o getting to specific, been working 20 years in biosafety and biosecurity fields. Biocontainment Standards and Practices for animals are much more stringent then for humans.

    Just one example of the absurdity I often see: nurses take the buses and grocery shop in their scrubs.

    The operational practices implemented recently in CHSLD (Hot and Cold zones) are a basic protocol that should not be touted as a new hotness it is common practice and should have been standard practice for years now. Infected people should have been isolated into a particular wing and cared for there so as not to infect other patients.

    The epidemic in old age homes is a failure of Government/Bureaucracy that manage those homes as the “employer”.

    Also, note there is a lot of misinformation around deaths in old age homes. Yesterday, on the local news station they stated: “53 people died recently in a CHSLD because of coronavirus crisis. This is 8 more then what is usual for that time period”. In other words, 45 people would have died during the same time period under normal circumstances. Is this due to underlying conditions or poor care as the result of lack of staff from coronavirus? hmmmm…

11. Also: if “lowly” farmers can be taught biosecurity principles and practices and implement biocontainment protocols on farms, there is no reason such cannot be taught in Colleges and Universities as part of health care fields.

    It is surprising to see how “pig ignorant” students or graduates are in implementing and practicing these protocols and their importance for their own safety and that of their patients.

12. “If you are going to make an omelette, you’ve gotta break some eggs.”

    I guess everybody believes that, not just the commies.

13. My mother is in hospice, she has an aide who comes three times a week to bathe her and check for bedsores. I don’t worry about my mother so much, she is ready to go, but I do worry about my 73 year old sister who is living with her doing the main caretaking. Reading the right wing media, this makes me asshole.

    I actually have multiple at-risk over 65 siblings with various conditions. But I guess if you want to make an omelette…. I just would like there to be ways to protect them that go beyond vague direction to protect them somehow.

14. My sister and I had a wonderful vacation in Arizona and New Mexico in early February. While in Tucson, had an interesting discussion with an retro store owner who thought that our leader (he did not know the name of position of our “noble leader”) was just wonderful and how great our healthcare system was compared to the US. I told him that healthcare represented over 50% of our taxes and that Canadians paid higher tax than Americans (on average). As well, at 68, I am rapidly becoming a “useless eater” whom the government would like to “just go away”. We also gave him some instances of the bad healthcare which we both have received in the course of our lives. I ended by saying that you want to be well-off and healthy as you become older, in order to avoid the national healthcare system. He continued to not believe us and thought that the Democrat party would take back the White House in November. There are many, many people like him in both Canada and the US>

15. It does depend. My mother in law moved into the new retirement place in Calgary a couple years ago. They have been all over this from day one. Key staff are living at the apartment complex. Workers had salaries increased last year so none have second and third jobs. Masks mandatory for staff. Staff checked daily for illness. Visitors banned. Deliveries disinfected. Temperatures taken. They have been great but they aren’t one of the waiting for death places and are definitely unique.

    1. Exactly. And going back to my post of yesterday, why can’t this model be adopted for other key workplaces to prevent the closures of packing plants and distribution hubs?

       1. As of 2020 all future profit/loss models will include the cost of slow downs and shut downs.
          Nothing so motivates as projections of doom from your accounting department.

          1. I have written a couple of business continuity plans, and they included pandemics by requirement, and they held up OK in some ways, but man what a failure of imagination as to what a pandemic really entails.

       2. Important to spray that Amazon package before opening. Amazon does not pay well.

          As Kate says, all businesses need new protocols. Very doable

16. More than twenty years ago I was leasing sites for cell towers for one of the main carriers in Canada. One potential candidate site near London, Ontario was a turkey operation (they raised the breeders I was told). I was also informed if they did proceed with a lease, all construction vehicles would have to be decontaminated prior to entering the property notwithstanding the cell tower would be distant from the barns. We finally decided to look elsewhere as it would be too much trouble to do this. It did impress on me just how sanitary these operations are.

17. President Trump should launch a Federal Investigation into all Elder Care Facilities throughout America. The truly AWFUL number of ChiCom-19 cases and DEATHS at Elder Care Facilities … in every single State … is nothing less than horrific! Anyone who accepts the death rates at these facilities as … normal … because, well … old people die … need their heads examined. It is patently obvious there’s something going terribly WRONG with the practices and procedures at these places.

    For God’s sake! These people were sheltering in place … and social distancing … before it became kewl

18. It’s a silly comparison. In animal barn it’s brought in on clothes and shoes. In an old folks home it’s brought in by your LUNGS.
    Wash all their clothes and spray them all down with carbolic before their shift and one nurse with the wuhan will still infect an entire wing.
    Obviously they’re testing the nurses and help to the best of their ability.