Such changes as were observed in the flesh of these cold-stored fowls make it especially desirable that there be carried out certain pharmacological experiments, using preparations of cold-stored tissues. It is held by some of our most eminent medical authorities that many severe intestinal disturbances are traceable to cold-storage animal products, particularly when the viscera are not removed before storing. Hemmeter" says in this connection: "I have personally observed numerous cases of sudden and severe auto-intoxication from the gastro-intestinal tract which I could interpret in no other way but that they were due to the ingestion of cold-storage. food."

In view of the indisputable fact that changes do take place in flesh at low temperatures, and considering the authority lent to the above statement by the prominence of its author, it would seem most necessary that further experiments based on strictly scientific principles be prosecuted looking toward either its refutation or explanation in order that the evil may be remedied, if it exists. The intestines, which are left in situ in storage birds, show a very marked degeneration. Their muscular walls grow thinner in cold storage until they are the merest remnants, which threaten to disappear altogether and which even very careful handling may easily rupture. This degeneration is noticeably active in the muscular rather than in the cellular tissues of the intestines. This is important when it is considered that the bacterial flora of the intestinal contents will, of course, contain any pathogenic germs which usually accompany the colon bacillus. Hence the perforation of the walls of the intestines, which apparently takes place by continued digestive processes even in cold storage, would open the way for a rapid migration of such bacteria on thawing and previous to cooking. Thus it is quite possible that dangerous bacterial organisms might be translated to the edible portions of the fowl through the perforations of the intestines in the period between thawing and cooking. This degeneration of the walls of the intestines must, therefore, be regarded as highly significant.

a Memorial number of the Maryland Medical Journal, June, 1905, 48: No. 6.

APPENDIX.

TREND OF LEGISLATION REGULATING THE COLD STORAGE OF FOODS, AND OPINIONS EVOKED THEREBY, ESPECIALLY WITH REFERENCE TO DRAWN AND UNDRAWN POULTRY, ETC.

GENERAL DISCUSSION AROUSED BY PROPOSED CHICAGO ORDINANCE.

In 1906 an ordinance was introduced in the Chicago council to exclude from the city trade all undrawn poultry or animals as food products.

In the course of the discussion which this bill evoked Runnels and Burry, attorneys for the cold-storage warehouse interests, issued a pamphlet dealing not only with the question of drawn and undrawn poultry, but with cold-storage conditions in general, and from which the following extracts are taken.

In regard to the quantity of material stored they state:

About twenty million pounds of poultry are cold stored in Chicago each year, and there are stored proportionate amounts of butter, cheese, meats, game, eggs, and other food products.

In a letter from a large western firm the statement is made:

*

*

*

We bring to the city of Chicago for storage annually 6,000,000 pounds of poultry, 300 carloads of eggs, and 100 carloads of butter, 5 per cent is sold for Chicago consumption. The other 95 per cent is sold for consumption in cities outside of the State of Illinois or abroad.

During the month of January of the year 1906 this firm shipped to Liverpool and London 1,000,000 pounds of poultry. The business of this firm during the year then just past (1905) had exceeded $1,500,000.

In dealing with the question of the length of time the various coldstored products should be or may be carried, the pamphlet cited makes the following statements:

*

*

Eggs and apples, which are perhaps stored more extensively than any other commodities, can not by any system of cooling or refrigeration be kept a year in cold storage, and they are usually taken from storage in a much shorter time than that. Probably few apples are kept over six months in cold storage. * Eggs are put in storage during the months of April, May, June, July, and a few in August. April and May eggs keep best. In selling them the owner sells the latest eggs first, so that July and August eggs are never in storage more than from two to four months, while April and May eggs are closed out usually during December and January. Some eggs remain, therefore, in storage more than six months, but the rule is that they are to be disposed of by the first of February.

108

Poultry is sent to market, dressed and stored, during the months of October, November, and December. The amount so stored, killed when poultry is in its best condition, is intended to supply the market with the best goods obtainable until the new stock comes in during the next receiving season. Necessarily, therefore, part of this stock is carried for more than six months.

In the letters forming a part of this pamphlet the statements on this phase of the question are quoted as follows:

When poultry is to be frozen, the best stock in the market is generally selected; and if the same is killed and cooled properly, it can safely remain in cold storage for fully two years, if necessary, without becoming tainted and injurious to health. However, it is seldom, or, I might say never, kept longer than eight months.

* *

*

Poultry that is dressed and cooled off properly before going into cold storage will come out in good wholesome condition any time, within at least one year, and it would take a very good expert to tell the difference between good fresh frozen poultry and fresh killed at time of eating.

Another dealer states:

Poultry with entrails in it can be kept in our modern freezers, where they shall be frozen and kept at a very low temperature, and be held in storage one, two, or three years, or even longer, without any detriment to the poultry itself, and on such poultry there is no possible chance of there being any cause for fear of ptomaine poisoning. Another warehouseman in a letter states:

Poultry placed in a freezer under proper conditions and kept at the right temperature will keep an indefinite length of time and in healthful condition.

Taking up the question of drawn and undrawn poultry, the attorneys for the warehousemen came to the conclusion that—

The experience of men well versed in the trade as to the desirability of drawing poultry before storing, it is best shown by the letters printed herewith. From them it will be seen that drawing poultry before putting it in the freezer is impracticable. It will not keep as well drawn as undrawn.

From the letters to which reference is made we find the following statements:

We have experimented with poultry in every form. We have found that it is utterly impracticable to carry drawn poultry in the freezer. It is very similar to any other product in that so long as it remains an air-tight package it can be carried much better than when it is open to the atmosphere, which dries it, discolors, and generally injures the inside texture of the bird when exposed. Further, of the markets which buy the frozen poultry from us there is not one that can or will accept it drawn; and although there is on the statute books in the State of Massachusetts a law demanding that all poultry marketed dressed shall be drawn, the same is a dead letter, and all our shipments to Boston and other Massachusetts cities are undrawn. Again, another dealer states:

We are handling every year a small portion of storage poultry that is drawn, heads and feet off, and we usually have to sell this class of goods at from 1 to 3 cents below the price of the poultry that is undrawn with heads and feet on. I feel satisfied that if we had to draw our poultry and depend on our customers to sell the same to, we would have to quit the poultry business, as we certainly could not compete with other cities that are selling undrawn poultry. I might say that I do not know of any market in the United States where we would be able to sell drawn poultry, even at a discount of from 1 to 3 cents per pound less than the undrawn poultry.

In another letter occurs the following passage:

A chicken when dead and undrawn is hermetically sealed, and you do not find the decomposition the greatest in the inside of the bird, but you do find it between the legs and the body and under the wings.

In still another letter the warehouseman states:

The result of having to draw poultry in the country for shipment into Chicago would cause the greater percentage of the poultry to arrive at its destination in a more or less putrified condition, and such poultry put into storage, no matter under what conditions, even with the use of modern refrigeration, the inside of the poultry (the fact of its having been wet) will become moldy, either showing mold with black spots or with a woolly fungous growth.

That opinion is not unanimous in regard to the advisability of retaining the entrails in dead animals until the time of cooking shall arrive is indicated by a number of public statements from various sources, certain of which are appended.

VARIOUS OPINIONS ON DRAWN AND UNDRAWN POULTRY.

Franklin G. Fay, of Sacramento, writing on the subject in the California State Journal of Medicine, 1904, Volume IV, page 66, states that

Resolutions condemning the use for human consumption of fish and poultry from which the viscera were not removed at the time of slaughter were passed by the Sacramento city board of health, and that such legislation, being before the Sacramento board of trustees, embodied in the form of an ordinance, was meeting with strenuous opposition on the part of the dealers, led by the large packers and coldstorage men.

Doctor Fay says:

*

If their immense interest in this matter is really in behalf of the public, we should have no difficulty in making a satisfactory adjustment, but as yet we have found no consumer outside of the trade who is opposed to legislation. * * The reports of the Canadian commissioners of agriculture show that the requirements of the English market demand that the intestines be removed.

Among the very prominent opposers of the custom of marketing undrawn poultry is Doctor Cavana, of Oneida, N. Y., who makes the following statement in a paper entitled "Dangers in Undrawn Poultry and Game," presented at the annual convention of the American Association of Railway Surgeons at Chicago, Ill., October 17, 1906:

Bacterial cultures made from the breasts and legs from 100 undrawn fowls proved the presence and thorough permeation of the tissues in each specimen, with the various groups of intestinal germs, some tests showing no less than eleven distinct groups in one poultry specimen. Among the varieties of pathogenic bacteria identified was the Bacillus coli communis, the Staphylococcus pyogenes aureus, the Bacillus proteus vulgaris, and the Streptococcus pyogenes. Previous tests of intestinal matter taken from the entrails of recently slaughtered fowls revealed the presence of these latter germs in great abundance in the intestinal canal of every fowl examined, and their discovery in the remote tissues of the undrawn cold-storage specimens proves un

mistakably that their source was from the alimentary canal, and their permeation of the tissues the direct result of the retention of the intestinal tract and its contents in the sealed abdominal cavities of the poultry carcasses. Growers of poultry will support us in the assertion that the ducks and hens of the barnyard are the scavengers of the farm. They are constantly picking over the soil, the farm garbage heaps, and other bacterial hotbeds, and no accretion or mass of decaying matter ever becomes too repulsive for poultry food, especially that of hens. In our bacteriological studies all of the cultures were made from the eatable tissues of the various specimens and with the most thorough aseptic precautions. The Bacillus coli communis was found in 100 per cent, or every specimen tested; the Bacillus proteus vulgaris in 6 per cent; the Staphylococcus pyogenes aureus in 20 per cent; and the Streptococcus pyogenes in 65 per cent of the 100 examinations.

Probable infection before storage.-The cold storage plant owners of New York City inform us that their poultry stocks are collected from all parts of the country, `even as far distant as the States of Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. After slaughter the feathers are removed and the carcasses packed in barrels without further dressing. The head, feet, and legs, as well as the craw of partially digested food, and the decomposing livers, lungs, and intestines with their filthy contents, all combine to make valuable weight, and are therefore left in the sealed cavities of the fowls, forming conditions which force the general infection of the tissues by the flagellated, or rapidly swimming intestinal bacteria, which double their quantity and numbers every forty minutes, a single bacillus being capable of developing over forty-two billion germs in twenty-four hours. Their shipments are made by rail and steamship, and cover transit periods of several days before reaching the cold atmospheres of the storage warehouses.

To determine the activity of these germs and the period required for their permeation of the tissues in the slaughtered undrawn fowl, we caused to be made a series of experiments, the results of which justify the belief that a great percentage of the infected poultry and game stock in storage became so infected before reaching the low temperature of the storage warehouses.

As a direct reply to the above-mentioned work of Doctor Cavana, Dr. Henry A. Higley, at the solicitation of the New York Poultry Dealers' Association, made an investigation and presented the same at a hearing before the legislative committee at Albany, on behalf of the opposition to a bill introduced by Doctor Cavana providing that all poultry must be drawn within eighteen hours after killing. Among Doctor Higley's conclusions are the following:

1. No matter how many of the bacteria which are concerned in this discussion there may be in the intestinal and thoracic cavities of dead undrawn poultry and game, they can not invade the edible portions so long as the temperature of such poultry and game is kept at 5° C. (41° F.) or below, because these bacteria do not grow at such a temperature or below.

2. Dead, undrawn poultry and game kept at a temperature (above 41° F.) which would allow the invasion of its edible portions with these bacteria mentioned from the intestinal tract would be subject to putrefaction changes because such a temperature would be much more favorable for the growth of the bacteria which produce putrefaction, since they can grow at as low as 0° C. (32° F.).

3. Even if the bacteria invasion claimed by the supporters of this measure does take place, such bacteria can produce no poisonous substances because they are placed under unfavorable conditions of growth so long as the temperature of the fowls is kept anywhere near 5° C. (41° F.).

4. The longer dead poultry and game is kept frozen the less bacteria will it contain, because freezing temperatures gradually destroy bacteria.