Public Health

New Advances and Laws
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

The Food and Drug Administration is a government body with a presence far beyond its size. That is because it is not just an organization, but an idea. It was conceived a century ago to address a problem of modern society, and the creation has proved vital. There is now no democratic society that does not employ a body like it.

At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, there was revolution in Europe and revolt in America as well, against capitalism and the political leaders unable to tame its worst excesses. The idea, as President Theodore Roosevelt saw it, was to save capitalism by civilizing it.

When America was founded, the Industrial Revolution had not arrived; the telephone and telegraph, railroad, airplane, and auto had not been created. Nor had the great engines of free markets been set up to drive it all forward into the modern era. The dream of the founders had been of a placid agrarian society, where wealth and position were based on land ownership, and where decisions for the nation were taken not by lords but by citizens deliberating together.

But soon a rush of change swept away those visions as machines were invented and applied in every field; factories were built up around those hissing, tapping steam beasts. Workers left the farms for the cities to feed and operate the machines and to supply labor to the giant, national businesses - the first corporations, and America's first big bureaucracies.

An Era of Business Changes

The upending of the settled, farming society had seemed impossible. "It was frightening and bewildering to many - that a whole society should be taken over by moneymaking and the pursuit of individual interest," wrote historian Gordon Wood. President Abraham Lincoln was aghast. He said he saw it as the coming of a new class of tyrants to replace the kings and nobles just removed from their positions only 50 years before. "Corporations have been enthroned," Lincoln said. "An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working the prejudices of the people ... until wealth is aggregated in a few hands ... and the Republic is destroyed." The era of the robber barons was at hand.

Harvey W. Wiley, the government's chief chemist and the first leader of what would become the Food and Drug Administration, wrote of the robber baron period: "Various and colorful terms have been applied to that next-to-last decade of the nineteenth century. However the era may be characterized, one thing is certain." The time "brought forth many changes in business life and left many evils that called to high heaven for remedy."

At the beginning of the century, more than two-thirds of the people lived and worked on farms, but by the end, fewer than half remained. Cheap, factory-made products flooded the land, from Sunday clothes to strawberry preserves; everything was ready-made in a distant city.

The New Art of Chemistry

After centuries of airy science, the link of knowledge to practical life had finally been made, and the chemists were the leaders. Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany showed the nature of disease in germs and how to defeat them. At the same time, they worked on commercial concerns - Pasteur for the wine and silk trades, Koch on industrial dyes.

With new powers, but no new sense of responsibility or rules to create it, commercial life began its race to the bottom. New forms of cheating were now possible on a large scale for the first time, at exactly the moment when a food or medicine maker did not have to face his customer directly.

Wiley, chief of the chemistry bureau at the Department of Agriculture, had his chemists lay out the issues involving food in a report to Congress. They described an array of chemical-cheapening ingredients, colorings, and preservatives being used to radically change the appearance, smell, and taste of bad food without setting off alarms in the senses.

Copper sulfate can make faded vegetables appear green again; sodium benzoate can prevent decayed tomatoes from rotting altogether; and borax can make odorous ham acceptable when canned.

The chemicals used were not required to be tested for their effects on human health, and were not. There were no penalties for selling chemical-laden food. A new industry grew up making and selling preservatives with names like Freezem, Freezine, Preservaline, and Rosaline. They carried no labels, and food company owners testified in Congress that they used them without ever asking their manufacturers of what they were composed. Most were dilute solutions of formaldehyde, sulfites, borax, salicylic acid, and benzoic acid, among other things. All are somewhat toxic, and now restricted for human use to some degree; three of them are banned.

In addition to trying to prevent food from going bad, the new art of chemistry created opportunities for complete fakes. A bit of brown color and a dead bee or a honeycomb dropped into a jar of laboratory-manufactured glucose made a "honey" that was cheap to manufacture. Brown coloring and a pinch of flavoring could also "turn" glucose into cane or maple syrup. A spoonful of hayseeds and some pulped apple skins for color transformed the glucose into what could be called strawberry jam.

On the farm, foods that must be stored and their containers are sterilized and set aside - not practical for the new business. Sterilization was difficult on a large scale, and while the woman at home might put up a dozen jars of pickles and accept that three of them might go bad, businesses could not accept such odds. In addition, they had to ship foods many miles while the foods broiled in the sun, cooled in the shade, and shook with the train and wagon. With sterilization not a viable option and refrigeration too expensive and not always practical, preservatives became vital for transport. Altering food became the easiest way of saving it.

Wiley suspected that many of the preservatives were harmless, but in an effort to find out, he created the first significant study of the effects of preservatives on humans. Using a small newspaper ad, he recruited a dozen "young, robust fellows" who might be expected to have "maximum resistance to deleterious effects of adulterated foods." He fitted out a basement mail room as a dining hall, complete with white table cloths, and asked the volunteers to take all their nourishment there, at scheduled times. He also made them submit to frequent medical exams and worse, required them to carry a satchel at all times with the necessary jars and sampling equipment to collect all their urine and stool for tests.

Over months, meals were given with and without preservatives to a series of groups at the "hygienic table." To Wiley's surprise, he had no trouble getting volunteers. And along with them came newspaper reporters who were completely absorbed in what they called the adventures of the Poison Squad.

Though the experiments were flawed scientifically, the results shocked Wiley. He expected to see little or no effect, but instead he found quite a few of the young men getting ill when fed higher doses of preservatives with meals. It made him question his long-held assumption that it was permissible to allow chemicals, and drugs for that matter, to be put on the market first, and tested only later.

About the Author

www.fda.gov
FDA is A United States government body that oversees medical devices, including contact lenses, intraocular lenses, excimer lasers and eyedrops. In the US, these products must be approved by the FDA before they can be marketed.