Canadian girl out and aboot

We are currently having a bit of a crisis in Canada due to an outbreak of listeriosis due to an infected meat packing plant in Toronto. Several people across the country have gotten sick and died from the disease. The plant has been set down, there are huge food recalls and a media frenzy.

Last week, I got an email from someone affiliated with a citizen journalism site. The email they sent said "your meat photos." I had just posted a bunch of pictures from a visit to an auction mart, and thought they were referring to those.

Unfortunately, the person was actually referring to photos I'd taken during my visit to a meat packing co-op in the Philippines. The person thought that my pictures would be "excellent to illustrate the story on listeriosis."

I emailed back, telling them that the pics were taken in a coop in the Philippines and were completely unrelated to anything dealing with listeriosis, or Canada. I told them that I was a journalist and that I did not want my photos to be used for that purpose. I'm still shaking my head over this issue.

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One of the components of my job is to include stories about research that affects the agricultural industry. I like this aspect, because it allows me to be a science geek. Today I called the manager of the Lacombe Research station, which also does research into food safety and safe handling of meats in processing. I should be going down there to meet with scientists in the upcoming weeks. I'm really dorkily excited about this.

Since I've been reading so much about bees lately, I must admit that I found this story about gender in cartoons (especially in Bee movie) to be rather fascinating.

Yesterday I drove to a small town to view a Human Patient Simulator, which is seriously one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.

STARS, which is an air ambulance team here, has a training vehicle that they use to train doctors, paramedics and nurses in the area. STARS is used when accidents happen in remote areas. The human patient simulator is a mannequin which breathes, has eyes that move with pupils that dilate, a heart beat, and a pulse. He can also talk. To be honest, the whole thing was sort of creepy. The kids learned how to put a ventalin mask on the mannequin, helped him breathe through an ambubag, and used a defibrillator on him.

The whole thing is hooked up to a computer, which is in another room. A person sits at the controls and can see everyone with the mannequin by three cameras. There are also speakers inside so the person in the control room can hear the people working on the mannequin and can speak for the mannequin.

In a more advanced training situation, the person in the control room can create all kinds of symptoms for the mannequin so the doctors/paramedics have to learn how to treat the illness. It was both creepy and fascinating at the same time.

I asked the controller to make the mannequin call for Dr. McDreamy, which she did.