Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/55

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ITHIN the past fifteen or twenty years cases of poisoning with foods of various kinds have apparently become quite numerous. This increase in the number of instances of this kind has been both apparent and real. In the first place, it is only within recent years that it has been recognized that foods ordinarily harmless may become most powerful poisons. In the second place, the more extensive use of preserved foods of various kinds has led to an actual increase in the number of outbreaks of food poisoning.

The harmful effects of foods may be due to any of the following causes:

1. Certain poisonous fungi may infect grains. This is the cause of epidemics of poisoning with ergotized bread, which formerly prevailed during certain seasons throughout the greater part of continental Europe, but which are now practically limited to southern Russia and Spain. In this country ergotism is practically unknown, except as a result of the criminal use of the drug ergot. However, a few herds of cattle in Kansas and Nebraska have been quite extensively affected with this disease.

2. Plants and animals may feed upon substances that are not harmful to them, but which may seriously affect man on account of his greater susceptibility. It is a well-known fact that hogs may eat large quantities of arsenic or antimony without harm to themselves, and thus render their flesh unfit for food for man. It is believed that birds that feed upon the mountain laurel furnish a food poisonous to man.

3. During periods of the physiological activity of certain glands in some of the lower animals the flesh becomes harmful to man. Some species of fish are poisonous during the spawning season.

4. Both animal and vegetable foods may become infected with the specific germs of disease and serve as the carriers of the infection to man. Instances of the distribution of typhoid fever by the milkman are illustrations of this.

5. Animals may be infected with specific diseases, which may be transmitted to man in the meat or milk. This is one of the means by which tuberculosis is spread.

6. Certain nonspecific, poison-producing germs may find their way into foods of various kinds, and may by their growth produce