January 3, 2004 Poisons In Your Food How did I first become interested in food safety? My daughter had a serious case of giant hives. Neither her pediatrician nor her allergist could find the cause. Finally, the allergist suggested, "Maybe it is the penicillin in the milk!" "What's penicillin doing in the milk?" I asked and he replied: "Well, farmers don't need a prescription to treat sick cows and while they are supposed to throw the milk from treated cows away, they pool their milk with other dairies. No one knows who puts the penicillin in the pool." Although I was a newspaper reporter at the time, I believed as most others did that there was a government inspector looking over the shoulders of our food producers. I began researching food safety and the result was my first book, Poisons In Your Food (Crown 1969). The opening paragraph read: When you sit down to eat a meal in your own house or in one of the 541,000 eating and drinking places in the Twenty-two years later, I updated Poisons In Your Food (Crown 1991) what I wrote in 1969 still held true: Illnesses from bacterial, viral, and chemical contaminants in food are increasing. The sixth edition of my A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives which will be published by Crown in 2004 shows that today has not improved much: The continued use of pesticides, many of which are known cancer-causing agents or toxins that contaminate food crops and animals. In fact, the attorneys general of In the new edition of A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, I also report: We want fresh strawberries in winter and tomatoes all year round yet we have replaced many of our farms with housing and roadways and our edibles are increasingly being grown in other countries. Only a tiny fraction of the foods that enters our ports is checked by our guardian agencies. Nearly two thirds of fish, almost half of the fruits and more than ten percent of the vegetables we eat are imported. Not only do we have to worry about foreign foods with undesirable additives and residues, we now have to be protected against terroristic tampering. FDA in 2003 announced publication of proposed regulations required by the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (The Act). Two regulations deal with establishing and maintaining records among food firms, and the administrative detention of foods that may pose a risk to public health. Two regulations concern the registration of food facilities and prior notice of imported foods. These regulations further bolster FDA ability to protect the more than 400,000 domestic and foreign facilities that deal with food within our country, according to FDA Commissioner Dr. Mark B. McClellan, MD, PhD. Under the rule, manufacturers, processors, packers, distributors, receivers, holders and importers of food must keep records identifying the immediate source from which they received the food, as well as, the immediate subsequent recipient, to whom they sent it. This requirement applies to almost all foreign and domestic food sources and almost all recipients of food destined for consumption in the There are loopholes, however. "To minimize the economic burden on food companies affected" by the rule, FDA allows companies to keep the required information in any form that they prefer. The proposed rule also states that existing records can be used to satisfy the requirements of the regulations if these records contain all the required information. With respect to the immediate previous source, the specific source of each ingredient that was used to make every lot of finished food product would have to be identified if this information is reasonably available. What is reasonably available may vary from case to case, according to the FDA. If an article of food is reasonably believed to be adulterated and presenting a threat of serious adverse health consequence or death to humans or animals firms are required to provide these and other records to FDA within four hours during certain business hours, or eight hours at other times. Transporters (e.g., trucking companies, private delivery carriers, railroads and airlines) are also required to keep similar documentation-including information about all the means of transportation used. Farms, restaurants, (including all operations that prepare food for, or serve food directly to consumers), fishing vessels not engaged in processing, and firms regulated exclusively by the The FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has set priorities not only emphasizing the prevention of terrorism on the food supply and handling transmissible diseases from food to humans. They have also added emphasis on food additives, dietary supplements and food biotechnology and increased their attention on food allergens. Twenty cents out of every dollar we spend goes toward a product under the jurisdiction of the FDA. There are 1,900 field operatives to the FDA workforce who also have responsibility for the multi-billion dollar drug and cosmetic industries. The FDA's Center for Food Safety has 904 full time employees, including office personnel, down from 924 in 2001. They are dedicated public servants but they must deal with the fact that contaminated, diseased food such as wisteria-loaded cheeses can kill quickly and the FDA can react rapidly but cancer-causing agents or neurotoxins may damage and kill slowly over 20 years or more. Perhaps one "mad cow" discovery and the threat of terrorism from thousands of "mad human beings" ironically may at last increase the safety of our food supply. BRAIN RESEARCH WITH PRIONS MAKING PROGRESS It is also ironic that the study of prions, a class of proteins that are believed to cause mad cow disease. are yielding insight into two other brain damaging conditions--- Alzheimer's and intoxication. Central to a protein’s function is its shape, and most proteins maintain only one shape throughout their existence. Prions, on the other hand, are proteins that can suddenly alter their shape or misfold. But more than just misfolding themselves, they influence other proteins of the same type to do the same. In all known cases, the proteins in these misfolded clusters cease their normal function and either die or kill the cell and ultimately to the organism. At least, that's what early studies showed. Scientists have discovered a new process for how memories might be stored, a finding that could help explain one of the least-understood activities of the brain and they say a protein may be involved. The study, published as two papers in the "For a while we’ve known quite a bit about how memory works, but we’ve had no clear concept of what the key storage device is," says Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Director Susan Lindquist, who coauthored the study with neurobiologist Eric Kandel at The work suggests it's possible that a prion may be the mechanism that enables the synapses and nerve cells in the human brain to store long-term memory. Theoretically at least, the researchers say, prions are perfect for this because prions could shift into this state quickly without the energy-intensive cellular mechanics that fuel most protein synthesis. The prion state is very stable and can maintain itself for months, even years. Scientists at Check the newly released edition of Brain Workout: Easy Ways to Power Up Your Memory, Sensory Perception, and Intelligence (iUniverse 2003).
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