Ever feel like you can't keep up with all the doom and gloom echoing around the internet? Motherboard's here to help. With GIFs. Welcome to THIS WEEK IN HELL, a feature that brings you hard-hitting animated coverage of the week's most apocalyptic events, straight from the digital pen of Jay Spahr.As we close the second week without a working government, the sheer idiocy of the shutdown has been well documented. Yet while Republicans have been content to grandstand with veterans and write off the shutdown as being little more than a closure of national parks, the 800,000 furloughed federal employees do a lot more than punch tickets at Yosemite. A pair of pretty important industries that are now lacking hands? Meat inspection and disease control.And guess what? We're in the middle of a huge salmonella outbreak from tainted chicken, and yet in the middle of investigations, inspection and disease control staffers have had to walk away from their jobs.Since March, an estimated 278 people in 18 states have been diagnosed with salmonella poisoning, with 42 percent of those cases ending up in the hospital—a rather high rate. USDA sampling in September initially suggested the chicken may have come from Foster Farms processing plants in California. Then the shutdown hit.The FDA and USDA have both continued food inspection efforts, including poultry, they're running with minimal staff—this despite the fact that there's not enough inspectors to go around in the first place. Only Monday did the USDA threaten Foster Farms with closure it it didn't clean up its chicken. Today, the USDA said Foster Farms' action plans were sufficient to prevent closure—a decision that, considering the USDA's shrunken staff, doesn't inspire much confidence.Meanwhile, the outbreak continues. The last confirmed case was two weeks ago—right before the shutdown, when the CDC furloughed 68 percent of its staff. The CDC, which is tasked with tracking and identifying outbreaks of foodborne illnesses to both prevent spread and punish offenders, was initially barred from investigating foodborne illnesses, a task deemed non-essential. The CDC has since recalled staff dedicated to tracking outbreaks, but the delay in investigating the salmonella strain—called Salmonella Heidelberg, it has a high rate of hospitalization—is unacceptable.The real problem is that huge centralized slaughterhouses provide poultry for the entire country, including the three Foster Farms plants implicated in California. As Tiny Nguyen at The Braiser explains, this means food inspection and regulation is subject to a tangled web of state and federal oversight. When the federal government gets shut down, that already-complicated system turns into a mess of furloughed workers and uninspected meat. So while the shutdown didn't exactly cause a salmonella apocalypse, the fact that it hampered efforts—all in the name of political posturing, mind you—is ridiculous. At least the selfish clownasses in Washington are "negotiating" now, right?@derektmead
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