Sunday, May 6, 2018

TOXIN by Robin Cook *****

This was a fast page turner and I hated putting it down for any length of time. It's about a doctor, his wife and child Becky, who contracted E Coli from eating a burger at a fast food restaurant.

WARNING: If you read this book you may become a vegan. Not kidding, the meat industry is disgusting right from the nail gun to the head of the cow to the mixture of frozen into fresh and other mixes of meat to create what come packaged out of the slaughterhouse. The spinal column often gets included in the food chain and that is what causes mad cow disease so it's in your hamburg whether in a supermarket or fast food place.

Dr. Kim's child Becky contracts a serious rare bacterial E coli and as she's dying he tries desperately to save her in the ER by hand massaging her heart but the heart is so far decomposed there isn't really anything to do for her and she dies. He removes his hand with bits of decomposed flesh from her heart on his gloved hands. He is horrified by what the E coli did to her body. It turned everything inside her to mush. He became furious enough to look into it with a USDA girl who ended up murdered and he found her head in the same place cow heads go. He figured her body was ground to hamburger.

In the end he and his ex wife connect, he gets a job at the killing warehouse and is literally sick to his stomach at what he sees. His job is to sweep the blood, guts and gore from the floor into a grate. The USDA officials that are supposed to be inspecting are up on a catwalk joking around on the job site NOT doing their job. The USDA is part of the problem and something needs to change in order for us to be eating real clean beef. One of the heads of the cow fell onto the disgusting floor of the slaughterhouse and that's likely how the E coli was passed into the meat. The head is used in hamburger as well as every part of the body; they even scrape the bones and get a greasy grey slime they add to the hamburg. Good luck with that vision.

Not eating hamburger anymore-- you can if you like but read the book first if you're so tough.

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