ON THE SIDE OF SALMONELLA

In spite of the $330,000 spent on radio/TV ads by the "Food & Water" superstition mongers, Sam Whitney, owner of the first US commercial food irradiation plant in Mulberry, Fla. (near Tampa), plans to go ahead with a plant able to handle 500-600 million tons of produce a year. By the time you get this issue the plant could already be operating.

Cobalt 60 is raised into position to kill bacteria and parasites with up to 300 kilorads of gamma rays 6-ft concrete walls shield workers when idle, Monorail carries food containers in and out or irradiation room Food loaded for shipping cobalt rests in deep pool of water]

Now the radical anti-defense and anti-nuclear Bull. Atomic Scientists has come to the rescue with an article by D.B. Louria, Professor of Preventive Medicine at the NJ. Medical School in Newark. His title is presumably meant to impress people who are too dull-witted to see through arguments like "If irradiation be-comes widespread, we may never know [whether it is good for you]." We may never know in what radiant health we might all now live if water plumbing, sewage treatment, personal cleanliness, vac-cines and inoculations had not become widespread, this professor of preventive medicine appears to be saying.

Titles and academic standing should not make anybody credulous. Sternglass is a professor, and John Cobb was not only one of the shallowest demagogues of the antinuclear profession, but also a professor of preventive medicine (in Colorado, now Hawaii). Louria has not one ounce of new evidence or arguments, and the shopworn ones that he has, place him in the class of Sternglass and Cobb:

"The FDA has approved [. . .factual blunder or misprint omitted, P.B.] 300,000 rad for treating pork, and 100,000 rad for fresh fruit and vegetables. These intensities are millions of times greater than that of an ordinary chest X-ray (about 20 millirad)." This is indeed dreadful. As pointed out recently [AtE Aug 81], the temperatures used in the oven baking your bread would be lethal if you were exposed to them yourself. And when wheat is ground into flour, it is crushed by pressures millions of times greater than your teeth apply when you chew the product.

He dismisses the assertion "Irradiation offers a means to decontaminate, disinfect and retard the spoilage of food supply" by countering that "adequate cooking and hygienic preparation will accomplish the same thing." Has he tried to prevent potatoes from sprouting or strawberries from spoiling by cooking them ade-quately? Did he prepare them hygienically when they were moldy, wormy and smelly at a time when both were still unspoiled without refrigeration [AtE Apr 79]? He has clearly found the secret of ade-quately cooked, yet fresh, fruit and vegetables, but as a socially responsible member of the concerned professoriat he should not keep it to himself. Nowhere in the article does he breathe a word about pork-spread trichinosis, chicken-spread salmonella, con-taminated shellfish, botulism, and other forms of food poisoning. A truly brilliant professor of preventive medicine.

He distrusts the FDA's safety report as based on only 5 of 441 available toxicity studies. In reality, the FDA only said that the 5 were fully adequate, properly conducted, and able to stand on their own in support of safety. The other 436 did not necessarily contradict them. More important, the FDA is a bureaucracy that risks very little by saying "no" and a lot by saying "yes." If they do say yes, it is likely to be super-safe; their no is usually quite un-trustworthy and disregarded in other countries as overcautious. And sure enough, there is the old bogey about the Indian study which supposedly found abnormalities in children fed irradiated foods. What he does not tell you is that the World Health Or-ganization condemned the study, and the Indian government dis-regarded it in approving irradiation [AtE Nov 87]. I would doubt that he omitted these facts on purpose; from the naivete bursting forth from this article, he is more probably too incompetent to know about them.

Radiolytes are substances that are produced in the food by high level irradiation. They are found in non-irradiated natural food also, and the FDA, as one might expect, went out of its way in trying to find them carcinogenic or otherwise dangerous. It found nothing. And Louria, in a paragraph headed by "The cancer threat" in bold print has to admit that there is no evidence of a cancer threat, but makes it sound as if that were ominous.

There is one argument that stands out in this treatise; it tells you where this erudite professor comes from. Widespread irradia-tion would so deplete the cesium stocks that the irradiation "industry" would lobby for reprocessing of spent fuel, and once reprocessing was permitted, "the DoE could separate the plutonium in spent fuel, which it could then use in weapons." I will not stoop to answer the main thrust of this paranoid idiocy, but if the learned professor thinks that reprocessed plutonium fuel can be turned into weapons-grade plutonium, he is clearly as bril-liant an engineer as he is an expert in preventive medicine.

Besides, when you scratch one of these "liberal" conspiracy theory hallucinators in the left-radical press, you will find a totalitarian. Louria is no excep-tion. The sign reproduced here is the label showing that the food has been irradiated. You can eat it, and Louria does not have to. But the thought of anybody breaking the "liberal" goose step of what is either forbidden or com-pulsory is unbearable to the great champions of freedom who publish in the press of the radical Left. You are all going to eat nitrates and other chemical preservatives, you serfs, and fruit that has been picked before it was ripe so it would last through the transpor-tation.

His final argument against irradiation is weighty. Maine has banned it. N.Y. and N.J. enacted a two-year moratorium, and N.J. has prohibited any manufacturing plants. If Louria were to turn his rare genius to history, he would find the witches of Salem guilty of witchcraft. They burned them, didn't they?