Illness Due to Dried Beef
By Editor
Illness Due to Dried Beef.—The New York Medical Record reports ten persons in three different families of Kalamazoo, Mich., as having been made seriously ill as the result of eating dried beef. The beef is said to have come from one of the large packing-houses, and the supposition is that preservatives in the meat caused the illness. Why not suppose that it was ptomaines, or some form of corruption in the meat itself? Does “healthy” meat, if dried, need any other preservative than the salt and the drying? Anthrax, a deadly disease, is reported as making havoc of stock in central Delaware, and carcasses of the animals that die are burned. Is it not true that frequently in such epidemics the butcher’s knife just precedes the veterinary surgeon’s diagnosis and condemnation, and that canned and tinned and dried beef and mutton and pork are the product of what soon would have been the victims of anthrax or trichinosis or cholera?