Word: healthful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gadfly. Definition: a usually intentionally annoying person who stimulates or provokes others, especially by persistent, irritating criticism. Example: Sidney Wolfe, director of Ralph Nader's Health Research Group...
Wolfe's sting has been felt mostly by Washington bureaucrats. For the past seven years, the 41-year-old doctor has been buzzing around federal agencies, urging them to take action on health issues. These range from banning cancer-causing chemicals from food supplies and the workplace to removing hazardous drugs from the market and warning the public about the dangers of unnecessary surgery, excessive X rays and liquid protein diets...
...well; he often left work covered by first-degree burns. That experience helped turn him toward a medical career. At Cleveland's Western Reserve University, Wolfe studied under famed Pediatrician Benjamin Spock who, he says, "made it very clear that it is not possible to understand people's health problems without understanding the circumstances from which they come." Those circumstances include job and living conditions, as well as diet?all ongoing concerns of the Health Research Group...
...Wolfe, then a National Institutes of Health researcher, began working with Nader. Three years later, they collaborated on a letter to the FDA warning that many bottles of intravenous fluid were contaminated with bacteria that had caused 150 cases of infection and nine deaths. They protested that the FDA's proposed solution?continued use of the bottles with added precautions?was shockingly inadequate. Two days later the agency issued a recall of millions of contaminated bottles...
Encouraged by that success, Wolfe turned his attention to public-health hazards that he felt were not being dealt with promptly or vigorously enough by federal agencies. His alarms, sometimes strident but usually accompanied by sound documentation, have resulted in a remarkable string of Government actions affecting the use of suspected or proven cancer-causing substances. Among them...