Medicine: There Ought to Be a Law

Like much of the U.S. population at the turn of the century. Theodore Roosevelt suffered periodically from what was unhandily called cholera morbus−an acute inflammation of the digestive tract, with diarrhea, cramps and vomiting. He took “cholera” medicine with him on his hunting trips to Wyoming’s Big Horns. But it was not until after T.R. became President that the prime cause of cholera morbus became known: spoiled food.

Spoiled food was a result of urbanization. In the 19th century U.S. farms and small towns, every housewife was an alert guardian of the freshness of the food she fed her family. But the growth of U.S. cities meant packing food and shipping it unrefrigerated for long distances.

It took a lot of education to convince most citizens (including T.R.) that good food could turn to poison. One such educator was a testy Department of Agriculture chemist. Dr. Harvey Washington (“Old Borax”) Wiley, who got a volunteer “poison squad” to eat spoiling food, triumphantly proved that it made them miserably sick. In The Jungle, Muckraker Upton Sinclair rubbed the nation’s nose in the filth of Chicago packing plants. On June 30, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt rode to the Capitol and ceremoniously signed the first U.S. Food and Drugs Act, to protect the people’s stomach from willful or careless poisoning.

Last week a robust Food & Drug Administration celebrated its 50th anniversary. Each year it passes judgment on the edibility, potability or safety of products worth more than $60 billion. Each week it removes an average of 98½ tons of contaminated food from the market−enough to feed poisonous meals to 131,000 people. It has driven from the nation’s drugstore shelves such once popular devices as eye-cup-like gadgets to restore sight, has purged labels of fanciful prose; e.g., one imaginative drugmaker touted ordinary sarsaparilla as a cure for everything from “female complaints” to syphilis. Today it approves license applications for 600 new drugs a year, modifications in 4,000 to 5,000 others. It certifies every batch of insulin made and marketed in the U.S., five major antibiotics, and all coal-tar dyes.

A policeman is rarely popular, but reputable makers and marketers of foods and drugs are deeply grateful to FDA for bringing peace and order to a once chaotic business. Its top job has traditionally gone to career men, and industry has violently opposed any attempt by politicians to make it a patronage plum. Current FDA boss is George P. Larrick, 54, who entered the service as an inspector, was promoted to the commissionership in 1954.

In 1955 FDA took 1,300 cases to Federal courts, won 98% without contest, won four-fifths of the 2% contested. Among last week’s batch of decisions:

¶ New York City’s Stella D’Oro Biscuit Co. was found guilty of selling baked goods fouled with rodent hair, was fined $3,000 on each of four counts.

¶ Herbalist William H. Cruez of East St. Louis, Ill., who sold worthless concoctions to FDA inspectors posing as sufferers from arthritis, diabetes and swollen feet, was sentenced to a year in jail.

The wholesale use of cosmetics has posed new problems. Last week FDA scientists and lab technicians were busy rubbing salves containing rouge, mascara, eye shadow and pancake makeup on shaved areas of rabbits or guinea pigs to test for irritating effects. The neotoxic age has brought DDT and still more lethal sprays, some of which stay on fruits and vegetables all the way to the dinner table. FDA permits only the minutest residues, has devised tests that will detect less than a billionth of an ounce of pesticide.

Deliberate food adulteration is relatively easy to detect−watering of oysters and butter, injection of as much as a quart of water into fresh-killed turkeys just before freezing. The FDA concedes that there is no such thing as a perfectly clean food. But it is forever inching toward the impossible goal. Up to now, two pellets of rodent excrement in a pint of wheat have been permitted. This week a new and tougher rule went into effect: only one pellet per pint.