From preservative to poison

To alert and inform their colleagues, experts with New York City’s Bureau of Preventable Diseases and Bureau of Food and Drugs published a case report in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) in 1945. Wartime brought with it a variety of public health concerns including – but not limited to – typhoid fever, dysentery, smallpox and malaria. None of these maladies was the focus of the AJPH report. It was a different type of outbreak altogether.

On a September day in 1944, 11 ‘old men’ arrived by ambulance to a New York City hospital with nearly identical symptoms. All had low temperatures and blood pressure, cold extremities, and a bluish or grey tinge to their skin indicating not enough oxygen in circulating blood (cyanosis). Most had vomited, all had diarrhoea, and about half had lost consciousness shortly after becoming ill. Treatment for their symptoms – which included stomach pumping and oxygen therapy – resulted in 10 patients recovering. One man, aged 82, died the morning after with an autopsy revealing bronchopneumonia plus ‘diffuse mahogany brown discoloration of the organs’. This brown discoloration – along with the noticeable cyanosis – pointed to poisoning.