In mid-March of 2007, a Minneapolis city employee was cleaning a sewer line in the northeast part of town. He was working over a manhole, when suddenly a geyser of human and animal blood began spraying into his face and mouth from below.It turns out a medical laboratory was routinely dumping blood into the sewer, an act allowed in the city. The city’s Metropolitan Council maintains that blood in sewers is “no more harmful than most other wastes in there.” The U.S. Centers for Disease Control stance is equivocal: “While any item that has had contact with blood, exudates or
