He Warms Newborn Pigs In Microwave

He Warms Newborn Pigs In Microwave HOG EQUIPMENT & IDEAS Hog Equipment & Ideas (351) 18-3-38 A Canadian researcher has come up with a way to save hypothermia-inflicted newborn pigs. He zaps them in a microwave. Dr. Luis Bate at the University of Prince Edward Island pops chilly pigs into a low-wattage microwave that warms them up "from the inside out". Bate notes that trying to warm up frozen pigs with heaters or other methods is often too slow to do any good. Microwaves act on the entire body, reviving pigs in minutes that would almost certainly have died. Bate warns that you can't warm pigs in a conventional kitchen microwave oven. He uses a special-built low-wattage unit that operates at a frequency of 915 megahertz compared with the 2450 megahertz of a 500-watt domestic model. It took more than a year of experimenting to come up with the right wattage that would do the job. He started by warming up a piglet sized container of water, and then moved up to corpses before trying the real thing. "No animals were hurt in testing," says Bate, who also hopes to develop a human-size microwave machine for reviving people suffering from hypothermia. That machine's a few years off. A Canadian manufacturer has working prototypes of Bate's pig microwave. It's a 5 by 6 by 12-in. long rectangular box that's big enough for one pig at a time. According to Wendell Dawson of D-Ossone Canada Ltd., the company hopes to have a unit on the market later this year. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Wendell Dawson, D'Ossone Canada Ltd., 18 Shell Ct., Charlottetown, P.E.I. CIA 2Z8 Canada (ph 902 566-4233; fax 902 566-5235).

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