O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

William Shakespeare
[Henry V]

So even as 67-year-old Elizabeth, NJ-based Topps Meat Company shuts down after having to recall 21.7 million pounds of ground beef products, it won't snitch on its slaughterhouse like the beaten woman who won't answer, "Who did this to you?" Nor has Wayzata, Minn.-based Cargill, Inc., which had to recall 840,000 pounds of Cargill Meat Solutions ground beef products from Sam's Clubs owned by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., named its slaughterhouse supplier or suppliers. Of course federal inspectors like Dr. Lester Friedlander, who trained veterinarians for the USDA until 1995, have long warned about hygienic anarchy in the slaughterhouses. "My plant in Pennsylvania processed 1,800 cows a day, 220 per hour," says Friedlander and the meat regularly contained, "[h]ormones, antibiotics, hair, feces, cancers, tumors."

It's obvious that Topps and Cargill didn't grow their own E. coli...but who did? The Florida cattle plant where a USDA inspector told Slaughterhouse author Gail Eisnitz cattle were skinned while fully alive and his superiors did nothing when alerted? Or the notorious Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) plant in Wallula, Wash., where second legger Ramon Moreno whose job was to cut hocks off carcasses at a rate of 309 an hour told the Washington Post the fully alive animals, "blink. They make noises. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around" even as he cut?

The scientists assembled the findings of all the studies to analyse them collectively. This revealed that people who have used their phones for a decade or more are 20 per cent more likely to contract acoustic neuromas, and 30 per cent more likely to get malignant gliomas. The risk is even greater on the side of the head the handset is used: long-term users were twice as likely to get the gliomas, and two and a half times more likely to get the acoustic neuromas there than other people. The scientists conclude: "Results from present studies on use of mobile phones for more than 10 years give a consistent pattern of an increased risk for acoustic neuroma and glioma." They add that "an increased risk for other types of brain tumours cannot be ruled out".