Word: ergot
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Fact: The U. S. Pharmacopoeia, law for the Food, Drug & Insecticide Administration, prescribes that one pound of crude ergot be used to make one pint of fluid extract of ergot which when injected into a white leghorn rooster will tint its comb bluish. Spanish ergot satisfies the formula. Russian ergot as imported into the U. S. docs not. Drug manufacturers have been cleaning Russian ergot of its contaminations and using two pounds of it to make a pint of extract. This Russian extract colors the cock's comb as does the Spanish...
Charges: Mr. Campbell's men have been lax in not enforcing the letter of the Pharmacopoeia, one pound ergot to one pint of extract; they have been lax in admitting to import filthy Russian ergot; the Russian extract contains obstetrically harmful adulterants; the Administration has, for improper reasons, been condoning the breaking of pure food laws by drug manufacturers...
...staff inspected manufacture as frequently as they could. Congress did not supply him with sufficient money to hire the vast staff he really required for fool-proof supervision of all foods, drugs and insecticides.* He was obliged to compromise for expediency, to trust the manufacturers' probity. The ergot extractors to whom he released substandard crude ergot were trustworthy. All the ergot extract which left the manufacturers was legally pure and obstetrically safe; but practically every extract of vegetable origin quickly deteriorates. Manufacturing druggists now date every bottle of their fluid extracts of ergot; retail druggists may not legally sell...
...made, the tenor of the final hearings last week indicated it will whitewash the U.S. administrators, as they have been whitewashed since the official days of the late Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley (see pg. 32), and it will recommend increased appropriation for Administration work. The Pharmacopoeia specifications for standard ergot extract may be changed. A committee has already started work on the eleventh decennial revision of the Pharmacopoeia...
...safety of available ergot extract, Senator-Dr. Royal S. Copeland, homeopath, rached this conclusion: "I have listened here for weeks. . . . I am forced to beleive that there is no foundation to the charge that the Agriculture Department or somebody else has brought about a standard that is a menace to the motherhood of America...