I admit it. I’m a health nut. A dedicated shopper at PC Greens and Whole Foods Markets. A subscriber to Environmental Nutrition, Nutrition Action Health Letter, Self -Healing and, yes, even New Age.
Published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Nutrition Action is notable for its campaigns for honest labeling of foods. Its current cause is to urge the FDA to require ingredient labels to be more legible, similar to nutrition labels already in use, so people with allergies, and aging eyes, could actually read what’s in packaged foods and possibly save themselves a trip to the ER. Another is to “Save Harry Potter from Coca-Cola.”
Nutrition Action regularly rates brand-name foods and fast-food chains to give us the real low down on disinformation marketing. Arby’s new Market Fresh Sandwiches made the “Food Porn” column this month. The deli-style sandwiches are advertised as having “nothing you’d expect from fast food.” Actually, with 780 calories, 40 grams of fat, 14 grams of saturated fat and 1,690 milligrams of sodium, its Market Fresh Roast Beef & Swiss is exactly what you’d expect from bad fast food.
Nutrition’s editors also are snappy headline writers: “Read My Lipids” for Bonnie Liebman’s article on how to lower your risk of a heart attack; and “How Now Mad Cow?” over David Schardt and Stephen Schmidt’s in-depth piece on BSE disease and potential gaps in FDA regulations for products like gelatin and glandular supplements.
However, interest in mad cow disease and other foreign maladies has been eclipsed in past weeks by fear of anthrax and the possibility that terrorists could infect thousands of Americans through mail contact, air ducts or municipal water supplies.
We’d pretty much stopped worrying about the mail after the Unabomber was apprehended, and we’ve been doing a fair job of poisoning our own water supplies with MTBE, cryptosporidium, arsenic, pesticide runoff and heavy metals. I’ve known more people who were severely sickened by inhaling mold spores (sick building syndrome)-stachybotrys and other naturally occurring slime-that need only moisture to do their dirty work.
But since Sept. 11, people are seeing threats everywhere, and the media is not really doing much to quell their fears. Public health workers are overwhelmed by demands for nasal swabs to test for anthrax spores, every skin rash prompts tests for cutaneous anthrax and every spilled substance is suspect. Officials were called to remove and test an unknown green substance from a New York sidewalk. It turned out to be guacamole.
Probably not organic, but certainly not lethal.
And doctors are prescribing Cipro, the only FDA- approved antibiotic for anthrax, although doxycycline works as well and is much cheaper. And they are prescribing it “as a precaution,” they say, to anyone who may have come in contact with anthrax spores. How long will it be before anthrax becomes resistant to medication, joining the ever-evolving list of diseases-pneumonia, tuberculosis and staph infections-that no longer respond to antibiotics?
Will creeping fear cause us to develop deadly diseases, maybe faster and better than the bioterrorists can?
I’m not suggesting that the deliberate spread of disease, or the threat of it, should be ignored. But I’ve argued for years that the inappropriate use of antibiotics-for colds, flu and other viral infections, and in livestock feed (not to cure disease, but to promote growth)-will catch up with us in ways we haven’t even imagined. I’m no activist, but I do write letters to the FDA, USDA, NIH. They’ve not been acknowledged, and with the new threats, they probably won’t.
I have no personal fear of contracting anthrax. I’m more afraid I’ll be bitten by a brown recluse spider or contract Lyme disease from a deer tick, dozens of which I’ve removed from our dogs. So it was with some chagrin that I leaned on my doctor to order a Lyme titer (blood test) when an unidentified bite on my leg developed the characteristic bull’s-eye rash and was spreading after two weeks. I think he was trying to talk me out of it, recognizing that the blood test is not reliable and the incidence of Lyme-infected ticks in Southern California is, in his words, “minuscule.”
Nevertheless, he ordered the test, gave me some cortisone cream to reduce inflammation at the site and, because I live so far away, a prescription for doxycycline, in case the test was positive. He said I could take it anyway “as a precaution,” but I decided to wait.
As he was leaving the exam room, he turned and said, “Well, keep it anyway. It works on anthrax.”