Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Shigella Outbreak Not Helped By Carnegie Cafeteria Filth

There is an outbreak of Shigella, a rare food-borne bacteria, amongst people using Carnegie Center. Center staff are aware of this and have posters up in the washrooms and cafeteria reminding people who have diarreahea, stomach cramps, or fever to wash their hands thoroughly. The posters specifically mention diarreahea with blood in it -- that is a key sign of Shigella.

A Carnegie staff person has also given a handout on Shigella to members who are sick or know someone who is. It is mentioned on the handout that Shigella is highly contagious. It is so contagious in fact that it is recommended that people avoid sharing the same toilet with a person with diarreahea from Shigella.

But Carnegie is failing where it counts. Last evening, they didn't even have clean trays in the cafeteria. If a person needed a tray to carry their dinner and dessert and drink to their table, they had to use a tray that somebody else had eaten off of. When people put their food on a tray and walk to a table in the Carnegie cafeteria, they often leave it on the tray as they eat, as it is common for the tables to have remnants of other people's food on them.

One individual who was diagnosed with Shigella last month, after eating regularly at Carnegie Center -- although this person cannot be certain they got it at Carnegie -- was shocked to learn that people are being expected to use other people's dirty food trays. "I was really sick for two weeks but it's been five weeks now and I'm still not totally over it," this person says. "They need to clean that cafeteria up." Carnegie just got an expensive new dishwasher, another concerned member pointed out.

At least one staff person does make an effort to keep the cafeteria tables clean. Members report seeing Jacquie wiping down tables, but many of her fellow CUPE members seem reluctant to do this job, claiming that it should be done by "volunteers".

A Carnegie member reported seeing a food server wearing rubber gloves, and operating the cash register as well, pick up a piece of food and put it in her mouth with her fingers. Then a customer ordered a piece of banana bread and she picked it up with the same hand that had just been in her mouth. Generally, cake at Carnegie is wrapped in cellophane but on this occasion the member says, the server "reached into a bag to get it." The member knows this food server -- who "volunteers" and is paid in food vouchers -- and says she is a drug abuser.

Public Health officials are tracking Shigella in the Vancouver. Time for them to swoop down on the Carnegie Center cafeteria and enforce stricter health standards.

The problem of the Carnegie cafeteria being unclean is an ongoing one under the administration of Director Ethel Whitty. The Downtown Eastside Enquirer has mentioned this and other inadequate provision of services previously, and drew the ire of Whitty who at one point was involved in a "witch hunt" at Carnegie to find tattle-tale bloggers.

3 comments:

Dag said...

A man as recently hauled off to the hospital in a town outside of Vancouver after he challenged a couple of armed men who pepper-sprayed him in the face, who beat his head in with clubs, and who finally tazed him into submission: the guys were policemen, and they have a legal right and even a duty to do such things to people who challenge them. The guy who lies dying if not dead by now, had a choice, and he chose to piss off guys who could and maybe did him. No one forced the guy to pick a fight with armed men.Choosing to pick a fight with even one armed man is stupid beyond words, and to pick a fight with lots of them, more available when needed, that's a choice only a guy seeking death would make. Crazy? Well, doing crazy things can get one killed. There's no mystery in it. There's no cause to sympathize. Stupid and crazy often means, "Gonna die, boy."

So, if one is short of hard cash and is hungry, the smart thing to do would be to seek and find a cheap and decent meal. Smart rather than stupid and crazy, one goes to a cheap and decent place for food. A choice freely made. A government run cafeteria? A seemingly smart choice. But how smart is it to trust ones health and safety to a group of people who make high and now higher union wages for working in a cafeteria and who yet foist off the work to "volunteers" who are paid $0.80 per hour in food stamps? Putting ones life in the hands of those who walk off the job demanding more money for little effort in the first place while leaving the poor to fend for themselves isn't inspiring of trust. Those who make $104.000.00 per year that we know of, those who ban and bar the homeless on a whim from food and shelter for the satisfaction of a snit, they can't really be trusted to serve the public well in other ways. The disparity between the "workers" who make roughly ten welfare checks per month to the clients' one, well, how do you think the "workers" feel about such lowly others? Like any in-group, they'll band together and exclude the "poor" and let them hang. It's the nature of things.

And those who rely on those others who have zero actual regard for anything but their own, the poor going to the rich for food, expect to get poisoned in the same way you'd expect to be wiped out by the police.

The police are a group of controllers who act on behalf of society at large. They have a specific role in society, patrolling the city and keeping order. The povertarians at the Carnegie Center do the same within the confines of their sinecure. The povertarians are police within the social welfare system. If you deal ith them they can and seemingly do trounce you, a la Simpson and others. And if you expect to have a meal that won't poison you, ask why you expect that. The povertarians can always blame filth on the filthy, poison on the poor who bring it with them. The povertarian can claim s/he needs even more money to control the "poor." You put up with these people and you make a choice to be degraded and sickened and perhaps killed. If you go to them and are as you are, it's little different from provoking armed men in uniform. The povertarians simply have different uniforms. They are still the police, and they still have the power to do to you as they feel, even if it means calling colleagues in other uniforms to do to you as they will. You get what you pay for, and you choose what that is.

reliable sources said...

dag,

The guy who got subdued by the cops out in Chilliwak is now dead.

That guy did pose a challenge to the cops -- unlike the guy at the airport who was recently tasered to death -- but they pounded him on the head too much I think. But they're in luck: there's no video. There are just a few still photos of his battered face.

I was thinking about your point that since the $104,000 woman -- Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty -- allowed a homeless guy to be barred over a snit (without any evidence against him), she really can't be relied upon to perform well in other areas.

Not only did Whitty allow a completely innocent man to be barred from Carnegie, she allows the poor to be locked out of the well-funded computer room on a semi-regular basis. So it should come as no surprise that people around Carnegie have been reporting getting horrific diareahea for two months now in what could become an epidemic, and Whitty's staff with the big raises won't wash the cafeteria trays when the clean ones run out.

Dag said...

The nasty irony of all this is that the povertarians will be able to use it, and will use it, to demand more money for more "services" to "help" the "poor". It's all a creepy fantasy played out for the benefit of those who feel they should be moral but don't really have the time or interest to do much of value, like parents who send the nanny to but Christmas toys for the kids.

Ethanol will be able to claim that if only her budget is doubled she can prevent an outbreak of sickness across the city, and who will refuse her? If a few patrons of the Carnegie Center die on the stoop, then the money will come in ever faster, concern in the suburbs growing as alarm spreads that the filthy will go to Kerrisdale, a fancy place as I understand it, to go through the garbage. It's all a matter of social control, and Ethanol makes her money on the understanding that the poor will be kept under control and quarantined.

If you choose to put yourselves in the care and handling of Ethanol and her ilk, then prepare to die. It'd be good for business,and there are always more "poor people" to take the place of the dead. Alternatively, one could demand work for a wage. That might be called living.