Elixirs of death

The described symptoms may not always have relevance for human exposure. Nevertheless, the EU s Scientific Committee for Food (SCF) has recently published its risk assessment for dioxins and the PCBs related to the dioxins, and state that a weekly intake dose of 7 pg of dioxin/kg of body weight (or lower) is tolerable. The Environmental Protection Agency s Science Advisory Board in the U.S. also concluded that dioxins might give health effects at levels close to background exposures (see Kaiser, 2000). One of the problems is to decide if its toxicity has a threshold, and as yet, it has not been possible to agree on a safe dose. 

The following concentrations may be found as typical average values in various foods  

A weekly intake below 7 pg TEQ/kg of body weight is recommended. This is very difficult to achieve if fatty fish is consumed. On the other hand, it is recommended that we increase consumption of fatty fish at the expense of red meat, eggs, and milk. But the potency of dioxin is difficult to agree upon and is a matter of using different uncertainty factors and models for extrapolation from laboratory animals to humans. The toxicity between species varies extensively and makes extrapolations between species very problematic. 

Substances often called dioxins have been present as contaminants in many pesticide formulations and in some bactericidal products. Dioxins are found in smoke from refuse incinerators and in effluents from the wood pulp industry, which uses chlorine as a bleaching agent. The magnesium industry used a production method that caused the formation of many dioxins (strictly speaking, dibenzofurans). Car exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke also have a low concentration. But dioxins may also be formed from more natural processes such as forest fires and cremations. Forest fires are suspected of producing 59 kg of dioxin per year in Canada alone. Humans have thus been exposed to dioxins long before the modern age. 

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Rachel Carson called DDT the elixir of death in her book Silent Spring. DDT use was banned in the United States in 1973, but because of its effectiveness and low cost, it is still widely used to control insect populations in developing countries. 

Rachel Carson, one of the world s first influential environmentalists, called it the elixir of death, yet i ston Churchill spoke of the chemical in glowing terms. Chtu chill was impressed by the effectiveness of ddt in helping the Allies to control lice that caused typhus, fleas that caused the plague, and mosquitoes that caused yellow fever and malaria. Indeed, when the Allies... 

It should never be lost sight of that one of the major reasons for the 1938 FD C Act was a public health disaster caused by a drug formulation mistake. In the 1930s, the Massengill Company s use of diethylene glycol in elixir of sulfanilamide led to 105 deaths. This same disaster was, by the way, repeated in Haiti in 1995 and 1996 (O Brien et al., 1998). Such considerations are also overlooked in clinical safety evaluations, though the history of their directly and indirectly causing problems, even to the current day, is extensive (Winek, 2000). 

Nonetheless, more than eight months elapsed between the first reports of deaths from Elixir Sulfanilamide and the enactment of the law (53. Two more major obstacles had to be overcome—who should control food and drug advertising, the FDA or the Federal Trade Commission, and what process of court appeal should govern FDA regulation-making—before enough consensus came to get the law passed. 

Ironically, the data showed that fewer deaths occurred among those who received belladonnoids than in those who did not. Furthermore, those who received both a belladonnoid and another agent (unspecified) had an even lower death rate, compared to the expected rate for the general military population. This, of course, is not necessarily an endorsement of any of these chemicals as elixirs of longer life (The rigorous selection process for volunteers is a more likely explanation.)... 

Carol Ballentine. Taste of Raspberries, Taste of Death the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident. FDA Consumer magazine, June 1981. 

But, oblivious to all of this, Massengill manufactured and distributed 240 gallons of Elixir Sulfanilamide in September of 1937. By October reports of deaths had come in, but the company refused to shoulder any of the blame. Massengill spokesmen maintained that they had broken no laws. Furthermore, they refused to divulge the contents of the formula because it was a trade secret. Finally, under pressure from the American Medical Association, the company revealed that the eUxir contained diethylene glycol. The nature and scope of the problem was now clear, and the American Medical Association, the fda, and the media joined forces in a massive effort to track down as much of the elixir as possible. They were astonishingly successful 234 of the 240 gallons were recovered. 

Ballentine C (1981) Taste of raspberries, taste of death. The 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident. FDA Consumer Magazine. FDA... 

In nineteenth-century literature, such chemical ambition to equal the total capacity of divine creation is difficult to find. Instead, the elixir of life and its counterpart, poison, figure prominently in the literature as Godlike means to control life and death. As we have already seen, that is why Alexandre Dumas pere let his Dr. Sturler say Am I not God like God -more God than God since I can retake and give back life, cause death to... 

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