Zombies with Short Attention Span Disease

Let's play a little game. I'll describe a "mystery disease," & you see if you can guess what it is.

Patients describe the disease beginning with aches, cramps, tingling and eventually numbness in their extremities - first legs, then arms, then fingertips & toes, sometimes in the face. Patients would begin to experience weakness, tiredness & an inability to stand for any length of time. It presents as very similar to Guillain-Barré syndrome, & seems degenerative and related to the nerve system in some way.

Oh, by the way, everyone who has the disease works in a slaughterhouse.

Did you figure it out, yet? OK, I admit, it was sort of a trick question. See, this illness is considered "new." It's Progressive Inflammatory Neuropathy, or PIN (personally, I think it should have been Progressive Inflammatory Grey matter, as long as we're being cutesy with the acronyms).

Perhaps, like me, you thought the description sounded suspiciously like Kreutzfeld-Jacob or Mad Cow disease and if you did, you wouldn't be too far off. My first thought after reading the symptoms was, where do they work & what do they eat? Turns out that not only did the sufferers work in a slaughterhouse, they all worked in the area of the abbatoir where compressed air was used to literally blow the brains out of pig skulls for packaging & eventual human consumption. Yep, they've been inhaling pig brains in the form of a fine mist.

The CDC and the FDA insist that pig brains are perfectly safe for humans to eat, so how could this be?!!? Listen, people, I'm going to say this once and once only - stop eating the brains of large animals & stop believing that people in government know what they're doing!

For maximum safety, I'd suggest you just stop eating brains, but at least make sure the animal they came from is no bigger than a sparrow, fer chrissakes. I get it, your kin/culture group has been eating brains for a long time & you don't want to stop, but how many times does this have to happen before we figure out that brains are not safe for humans to eat anymore? Perhaps they never were and we're only now connecting the dots between madness & all varieties of brain-eating, but it's 2008 now, there's just no good reason to be eating brains!

Medical Mystery Solved In Slaughterhouse