Plentiful Placenta?

By Marcus Gilmer in News on Mar 3, 2009 8:00PM

A bizarre, squeamish story from Urbana this week: a filter screen at a water treatment plant caught three placentas and the Trib confirms, "at least one of them [is] human." According to Julie Pryde, head of the Champaign-Urbana Health District, the placentas don't pose a health threat and were most likely the result of a midwife not being aware of the proper disposal procedure for a placenta.

Three more lines of interest from the Trib story:

• "I said, 'Who the hell is Perez Hilton?' " said Urbana Police Lt. Bryant Seraphin, a Sugar Grove native, after someone reported the news had been posted on the gossip site.
• In Chicago, the sheer bulk of "material" handled — the regional wastewater plant in Stickney alone, said to be the largest in the world, processes more than a billion gallons per day—means that even if placentas were being discarded into the sewers, they'd likely never be noticed, said Jill Horist, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.
• Rather than tossing the placenta after birth, [Jodi] Selander's site suggests burying it and planting a tree on the spot or even shaping the umbilical cord into a heart or wreath that, once dried, will leave "you with a lasting keepsake to remember this momentous time in your life."