The Food and Drug Administration is the oldest comprehensive consumer protection agency in the U. S. federal government. Its origins can be traced back to the appointment of Lewis Caleb Beck in the Patent Office around 1848 to carry out chemical analyses of agricultural products, a function that the newly created Department of Agriculture inherited…
The original Food and Drugs Act is passed by Congress on June 30 and signed by President Theodore Roosevelt. It prohibits interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs. The Meat Inspection Act is passed the same day. Shocking disclosures of insanitary conditions in meat-packing plants, the use of poisonous preservatives and dyes in foods, and…
In 1906, the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) of the USDA, along with state and county authorities in quarantined areas, began a cooperative campaign to eradicate the cattle tick. Experimentation in various forms of tick eradication was commenced with a federal appropriation. The method found to be most efficient was dipping the cattle in a…
In 1904 when Governor Hunt lobbied for funds to establish the first Puerto Rico Anemia Commission, thereby introducing a new administration in rural areas. The campaign appealed to many physicians pre-existing interest in regenerating rural jibaros and by implication, intervening in a variety of economic and political relationships that were compromised by the hurricane and…
Walter Reed proved Finlay’ s theory that yellow fever is transmitted by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito. In 1900 Reed was appointed head of an army board to investigate the causes of yellow fever, which had broken out among American troops in Cuba. In the United States yellow fever was an annual scourge; the disease swept…
The Yellow Fever Commission, founded as a consequence of excessive disease mortality during the Spanish–American War (1898), concluded that the best way to control the disease was to control the mosquito. William Gorgas successfully eradicated yellow fever from Havana by destroying larval breeding sites and this strategy of source reduction was then successfully used to…
December 10, 1899 treaty of Paris ended the SAW. Ashford was assigned as the Commanding Officer for the city of Ponce Military Hospital in the new U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. It was the hurricane of 1899 that was the catalyst for his next contribution. Many displaced persons from the center and south of the island walked for miles to receive…
L. Simond was the first to realize that manipulating a rat that had recently died could be extremely dangerous whereas after a time lapse of several hours the same dead rat presented no risks to man. He was also the first to detect an insect bite as being responsible for the lesions he had observed…
In 1898 Theobald Smith in Boston, USA, showed that the bovine bacillus could be clearly differentiated from the human variety both in its microscopic and cultural characteristics and in the disease it produced in different animals. It was thus apparent that humans could acquire tuberculosis particularly of the gut, by drinking cow’s milk infected with…
Arthur Looss was sent by Rudolf Leuckart to Egypt to study the transmission of bilharzia, where he became accidentally infected with hookworm, and in so doing discovered the method by which the larvae penetrate the skin. He spilt some larval culture onto his hand in 1896, while dropping it into the mouths of guinea pigs; observing the irritation this caused to his skin,…
The Louisiana State Board of Health established the first State Board of Health Diagnostic Bacteriological Laboratory in the United States. Louisiana became the first state to create a bacteriological laboratory on April 15, 1894 under the direction of Dr. Paul E. Archinard. The bacteriological laboratory was located in the City Hall Annex building which then stood at…
In 1894, Alexander Yersin and another scientist separately identified Y. pestis during an epidemic in Hong Kong. Years later the bacterium was given his name. Yersin also connected his discovery to the pestilence that swept Europe during the Black Death, an association that has stuck. One problem, however, is that compared to the wildfire-like spread of the Black…
In 1893, the Board of Health accepted two proposals submitted by dr. Herman Biggs which were to make history as important stages in the modernization of public health practices. The first was that the Health Department employ routine bacterial examinations for the diagnosis of diphtheria (and other infectious diseases); the second, that Dr. William H.…
A few years after beginning his work at BAI, Theobald Smith turned his attention to Texas cattle fever, a devastating disease that destroyed 90% of herds in some affected areas. It occurred in northern cattle that came in contact with cattle from Texas during cattle drives to stockyards in Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. It…
Henry Leber Coit, a medical doctor, was the founder of the first Medical Milk Commission and the certified milk movement, which resulted in the availability of safe raw milk from regulated dairies for physicians, their patients and the public. In 1889, Henry Coit, MD, of Newark, New Jersey, asked the Medical Society of New Jersey…
Out of the study of the London sewage and its behavior in the Thames came the conviction that purification could be carried out by natural processes, without the intervention of chemicals, and thus was evolved the biological treatment in contact beds, which system, destined to revolutionize sanitary engineering, was developed at the Northern Outfall Works…
Mr. Lowcock in 1892, filtered the effluent from a chemical precipitation process at Malvern through a gravel filter at the rate of 300,000 gallons per acre per day. He also used a fine surface layer of gravel to distribute the sewage. Hence in order to maintain aerobic conditions, compressed air was forced into the lower…
Sedgwick and Batchelder were among the first to count bacteria in milk. Their pioneering work in Boston, from 1890 to 1892, was a revelation and their method was quickly followed by others. In 1990 New York was the first city to use this approach as a basis for setting a bacteriological standard for ordinary market…
Babcock is best known for his test for butterfat in milk, introduced in 1890. By using sulfuric acid to release the fat from its normal suspension and centrifuging and diluting, it was possible to measure directly the percentage of fat by observing it in the neck of a specially designed test bottle. The simplicity of…