Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan.

  • Edwin O. Jordan
Date:
[1917]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Food poisoning / by Edwin Oakes Jordan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    small proportion of food-poisoning cases receives notice in the public press and a still smaller propor¬ tion is reported in the medical journals. Very few indeed are ever completely investigated as to their origin. Although most attacks of food poisoning are usually of a slight and apparently temporary nature, it does not follow that they are to be considered negligible or of trivial importance from the standpoint of public health. The human organism is always more or less weakened by such attacks, many of them, as we shall see, genuine infections; and, as is known to be the case with many infectious diseases, some permanent injurious impression may be left on the body of the affected individual. Under certain conditions it is possible that degenerative changes are initiated or accelerated in the kidneys or blood vessels by the acute poisoning which is manifested for a short time in even the milder cases. In yet greater degree these changes may follow those insidious forms of food poisoning due to the frequent ingestion of small quantities of mineral or organic poisons, which in each dose may cause little or no measur¬ able physiological change, but whose cumulative effect may be vicious. In view of the grave situation evi¬ denced by the increase in the degenerative diseases affecting early middle life in the United States,1 the extent, causes, and means of prevention of food poison¬ ing seem pressing subjects for investigation. 1 Tables A and B show that the “expectation of life” for adults of forty years and over is shorter in New York City now than it was thirty years ago (Table A), and that this increase in the death-rate in the higher- age groups is manifested in recent years in a wide area in this country
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