Slaughterhouse and spraying

I said I was doing things by alliteration, so today I had to visit the slaughterhouse and then spray for bugs. It only makes sense.

My day got a very early start this morning... 0100, to be exactly, when my alarm went off, telling me to get out of bed and get dressed to visit the slaughterhouse for a meat inspection. We arrived around 0130, and then the veterinarian and public health officer showed us around the place, to the lariage, where the animals are waiting to be taken toward the slaughter, and then to the stunning pen, where they shoot them with a bolt gun prior to slaughter. Once stunned, the necks are cut for slaughter, and after they've stopped thrashing around, the heads and hooves are removed, and then they're ready to go.

This is what the slaughterhouse looks like when they're almost done with the slaughter. They usually do between 20-30 cattle a night, and because everything's done by hand, they wait until they've slaughtered all of them before moving on to the next step. They slaughter goats and sheep here, too, but we only saw the cattle slaughter (no pigs; that's against Muslim regulations, to slaughter them at the same facility. I don't know where they slaughter pigs around here, but they do have pork, so it must be somewhere).

This was the part that was most impressive to me, how quickly they got that hide off the cow. Everything's done by hand, and it was less than five minutes of skinning, and it was done perfectly. No meat on the hide, no holes, just one big piece of cow hide. They remove the gastrointestinal tract and reproductive tract at this step, too.

Unfortunately, I was apparently not supposed to be taking pictures, so I don't have any pictures of the actual meat inspection, which is what I was there for. They inspect the head and the carcass separately (since the head had been removed already). They're supposedly arranged so head 1 belongs to carcass 1, which matches with hide 1 and intestines 1 and hooves 1, but the vet says that there's often quite a lot of mix-up.

For both the head and the carcass, there are three main steps: visualization, palpation, and incision. For the head, that's visual inspection to make sure there's no bleeding or bruising and everything looks symmetric. Then the muscles, tongue, and lymph nodes are palpated. Finally, the tongue and masseter muscles (open and close the jaw) are incised, to look for cysts (parasites) and abscesses (bacteria). None of the heads had anything wrong with them.

Next is the inspection of the carcass, and before, it's visualization, palpation, and incision. Again, what they're looking for is signs of bruising, bleeding, signs that good with poor bleeding of the animal during slaughter, and infection, with either parasites or bacteria. The kidneys, liver, lungs, and hind leg are all incised. In the liver, they're looking for liver flukes (which aren't found much in this part of Kenya, due to the proximity of salt water; liver flukes like fresh water) and echinococcus, another parasite. They also look for echinococcus in the lungs, and in the actual meat, they're looking for tapeworm cysts. The animals we inspected all passed.

So after getting a little bit more sleep, I was back in the hospital and back in the public health department. There were reports of cockroaches in the newborn unit (which we verified). Cockroaches themselves aren't vectors, but can carry bacteria on their legs. Besides, they're gross, and where there are cockroaches, other bugs will follow. Since we didn't want to be spraying preemies and otherwise sick babies with insecticides, we had to have them remove all babies (and most of the stuff) from the unit before we could begin, and then stay outside for another four hours. All sorts of fun. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to move everyone out of the maternity building (where the newborn unit), so we couldn't spray the whole building. The spraying remains in the room for several months, but the rest of the building will probably soon have a bug problem. Oh, well. Maybe then they'll consider moving their patients.

Tomorrow is my official last day in the hospital, but I probably won't do much, and I definitely won't stay past lunch (I'll probably leave much before that). There are still a few more things I need to buy for people, and I'm down to only coins, so I hope the ATMs are more cooperative tomorrow morning than they were this afternoon (the one ATM that took MasterCard decided that it doesn't like MasterCard, and my back-up ATM card is my government credit card for travel, which was maxed out on cash withdrawals, but is being paid today).

Almost home!