The Mandarin Palace Restaurant in Fredericton, New Brunswick (that’s in Canada) was closed after decomposing bear meat was found in a cooler during a routine inspection this week.

The meat, found in the on Tuesday, was turned over to the Department of Natural Resources. An investigation is ongoing.

The restaurant was closed because of concerns the bear meat could have contaminated other contents in the cooler, but the risk to public health is very low, the Department of Health said in a statement.

An inspection record posted on the government's website said, "Food must be purchased from an approved source. Wild animals are not approved."

The restaurant will remain closed until the cooler has been properly cleaned.

Samples of the bear meat have been sent out to test for trichinella, a parasite that can be transmitted to humans through consumption of raw or undercooked infected bear meat.

Associated Press reported yesterday that horses could soon be slaughtered in the U.S. for human consumption after Congress quietly lifted a 5-year-old ban on funding horse meat inspections, and activists say slaughterhouses could be up and running in as little as a month.

Today, Taiwanese animation house NMA released one of their signature videos to address the situation.

Grub Street New York says things to watch for in the video are “the horse that gets zapped into a pile of money (we're pretty sure that's not how the slaughter actually happens) and the bloody Seabiscuit saddle at the French dinner table.”

I appreciated the Canadian slaughterhouse worker in a hockey jersey prodding a horse with a hockey stick.

Some background on the horse slaughter debate from AP; Australia also has two horse slaughterhouses.

Slaughter opponents pushed a measure cutting off funding for horse meat inspections through Congress in 2006 after other efforts to pass outright bans on horse slaughter failed in previous years. Congress lifted the ban in a spending bill President Barack Obama signed into law Nov. 18 to keep the government afloat until mid-December.

It did not, however, allocate any new money to pay for horse meat inspections, which opponents claim could cost taxpayers $3 million to $5 million a year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have to find the money in its existing budget, which is expected to see more cuts this year as Congress and the White House aim to trim federal spending.

The USDA issued a statement Tuesday saying there are no slaughterhouses in the U.S. that butcher horses for human consumption now, but if one were to open, it would conduct inspections to make sure federal laws were being followed.

Pro-slaughter activists say the ban had unintended consequences, including an increase in neglect and the abandonment of horses, and that they are scrambling to get a plant going - possibly in Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska or Missouri.

Sue Wallis, a Wyoming state lawmaker who's the group's vice president, said ranchers used to be able to sell horses that were too old or unfit for work to slaughterhouses but now they have to ship them to butchers in Canada and Mexico, where they fetch less than half the price.

The federal ban devastated "an entire sector of animal agriculture for purely sentimental and romantic notions," she said.

Although there are reports of Americans dining on horse meat a recently as the 1940s, the practice is virtually non-existent in this country, where the animals are treated as beloved pets and iconic symbols of the West.

A federal report issued in June found that local animal welfare organizations reported a spike in investigations for horse neglect and abandonment since 2007. In Colorado, for example, data showed that investigations for horse neglect and abuse increased more than 60 percent - from 975 in 2005 to almost 1,600 in 2009.

The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office also determined that about 138,000 horses were transported to Canada and Mexico for slaughter in 2010, nearly the same number that were killed in the U.S. before the ban took effect in 2007. The U.S. has an estimated 9 million horses.

Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times writes that in the intensive care units at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., two L.E.D. displays adorn the wall across from each nurses’ station. They show the hand hygiene rate achieved: last Friday in the surgical I.C.U., the weekly rate was 85 percent and the current shift had a rate of 91 percent. “Great Shift!!” the sign said. At the medical I.C.U. next door, the weekly rate was 81 percent, and the current shift 82 percent.

Those L.E.D. displays are very demanding — health care workers must clean their hands within 10 seconds of entering and exiting a patient’s room, or it doesn’t count. Three years ago, using the same criteria, the medical I.C.U.’s hand hygiene rate was appalling — it averaged 6.5 percent. But a video monitoring system that provides instant feedback on success has raised rates of handwashing or use of alcohol rubs to over 80 percent, and kept them there.

Hospitals do impossible things like heart surgery on a fetus, but they are apparently stymied by the task of getting health care workers to wash their hands. Most hospitals report compliance of around 40 percent — and that’s using a far more lax measure than North Shore uses.

How do hospitals even know their rates? Some hospitals track how much soap and alcohol gel gets used — a very rough measure. The current standard of care is to send around the hospital equivalent of secret shoppers — staff members who secretly observe their colleagues and record whether they wash their hands.

This has serious drawbacks: it is expensive and the results are distorted if health care workers figure out they’re being observed. One reason the North Shore staff was so shocked by the 6.5 percent hand-washing rate the video cameras found was that measured by the secret shoppers, the rate was 60 percent.

The North Shore study, published this week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, is the first use of video in promoting hospital handwashing, and the first controlled study in a peer-reviewed journal of a high-tech effort to increase hand hygiene rates.

North Shore instead uses a video monitoring system made by a company called Arrowsight. Cameras on the ceiling are trained on the sinks and hand sanitizer dispensers just inside and outside patient rooms. (Patients are not photographed.) A monitor at each door tracks when someone enters or leaves the room — anyone passing through a door has 10 seconds to wash hands. Arrowsight employees in India monitor random snippets of tape and grade each event as pass or fail.

What makes the system function is not the videotaping alone — it’s the feedback.

The nurse manager gets an e-mail message three hours into the shift with detailed information about hand hygiene rates, and again at the end. The L.E.D. signs are a constant presence in both the surgical and medical I.C.U.s

This is Arrowsight’s first foray into health care. The company’s main business is meat: half the beef processing plants in America use its video system to monitor workers’ hygienic practices.

Adam Aronson, Arrowsight’s chief executive, said that at one plant cameras focused on a hand sanitizer dispenser right outside the bathroom. With monitoring and feedback, hand hygiene rates went from about 4 percent to over 95 percent, and the achievement was sustained.

At first Farber feared he wouldn’t be able to get approval; the conventional wisdom was that employees don’t like being videotaped. But then he thought about a recent experience at the dry cleaner: he had picked up some of his daughter’s clothes, but one of her suits was missing. He went back to the shop and told them the date and approximate time of his visit. They pulled up a video that indeed showed him leaving her suit behind. “If dry cleaners are doing that, we need to do that in the hospital,” he thought.

Sunday afternoon/evening in Brisbane, out wandering around the ‘burbs, and see a fine example of backyard butchering. I’m not sure what kind of hunk of meat this was, but they went at it for awhile, including the use of an electric jigsaw, and eventually packed the roasts in salt and wrapped them up.