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For Want of a NailAuthor: Rachel
A podcast about small mistakes that lead to big disasters. Disasters, fires, plane crashes, spree killings, institutional breakdowns, murders...let's talk about awful things that didn't have to happen, and the ways in which they should have been prevented. Language: en-gb Genres: True Crime Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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"A most noxious diet.": The Swill Milk Scandal
Sunday, 1 September, 2024
The young man is tired. His assignment that day had forced him up before the sun, tracking his target back to its resting place. And now that he is here, in this dark part of town with its hulking warehouses and polluted air, he wishes he had turned his boss down. Even outside the building, the smell is overpowering, filling his nose and lungs with its hot reek of rot, feces, sickness, and putrefying meat. Puzzled but determined, the young man slips inside past the workers smoking and laughing in the streets. Inside it is as dark as a cave. The windowless building offers no succour, no comfort, from the horrors enfolded within. The smell, a foggy stink within the streets, is almost a physical entity here. It forces its way into the young man's nostrils, over his tongue, down his throat, gagging him and churning his stomach. It is through sheer force of will that he does not vomit. But that will dissolved when he rounds a last corner and sees the true horror. The sight of hundreds living in squalor, misery, and disease...and the knowledge that poison is being spread throughout the streets of the city. Poison that may well have caused the deaths of thousands of children. Clapping a convulsive hand to his mouth, the young man rushes outside and vomits into the dirty street. This is the swill milk scandal.
