Can't Possibly Be True!

• A passerby shooting video in November outside the Lucky River Chinese restaurant in San Francisco caught an employee banging large slabs of frozen meat on the sidewalk -- which was an attempt, said the manager, to defrost them. A KPIX-TV reporter, visiting the precise sidewalk area on the video, found it covered in "blackened gum, cigarette butts and foot-tracked bacteria," but the manager said the worker had been fired and the meat discarded. (The restaurant's previous health department rating was 88, which qualifies as "adequate.") [KPIX-TV (San Francisco), 12-1-2014]

• India's Orissa state has established "health camps" to facilitate mass sterilizations to help control the booming population, but procedures were halted in November when Dr. Mahesh Chandra Rout matter-of-factly told BBC News that camps routinely used ordinary bicycle pumps to inflate women's abdomens. Orissa's senior health official immediately ended the practice and ordered sterilizations only in hospitals. (Enlarging the abdomen helps the surgeon to operate, but the proper agent is carbon dioxide.) [BBC News, 12-3-2014]

• The Food and Veterinary Administration of Denmark shut down the food supplier Nordic Ingredients in November after learning that it used an ordinary cement mixer to prepare gelatin products for nursing home and hospital patients unable to swallow whole food. An FVA official told a reporter: "It was an orange cement mixer just like bricklayers use. There were layers (of crusty remains) from previous uses." As many as 12 facilities, including three hospitals, had food on hand from Nordic Ingredients. [The Local (Copenhagen), 11-28-2014]

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