THE POISON APPLE
Myles Harris investigates
the causes of recurrent bouts of jaundice
THE cannibals of the Sepik river in Papua New Guinea call jaundice 'Eye belong him e yellah to mus'. In the late 19th century it, and a variety of other foul diseases, wiped out three waves of Jesuits who tried to get a sandal ashore for Christ in those vast, grey-green swamps. Nowadays it is only Jaundice that is common among Euro- peans. It leaves its victims feeling filthy for years. I developed it in 1972, three weeks after stepping off a plane in London from Port Moresby.
I was removed to an isolation ward in the Hammersmith Hospital with a view of the long-stay wing of Wormwood Scrubs. The old Victorian poorhouse was a good place to recover. No nonsense here about witch- craft, sanguma men who could teleport themselves hundreds of miles in the twink- ling of an eye, no digging with resurrec- tionists at midnight, kundu drums, sacred crocodiles, bark-caped pygmies with blow- Pipes, spirits that swing through the jungles on vines, cargo cults and rosaries to the Blessed Agatha Christie. In the Hammers- mith you woke to the Mirror, the sound of British teapots and the interminable roar of the telly. Masked nurses fed you from
disposable plastic dishes. I drifted from itching wakefulness into semi-coma and back to life again in three weeks. As soon as I could walk I left. But it was not to a full recovery. Cyclical attacks of persistent itching, a vertigo that made me feel my brains were running out of my ears and an enervating, trembling weak- ness dogged me for years. I kept away from hospitals. The last thing I had passed in the Hammersmith corridor was one of those trolleys with a false bottom they wheel the dead about in. It was sign enough. Besides, the medical profession's answer to pro- longed hepatitis was bone-thinning steroids that leave you hump-backed, moon-faced, spotty and a bit mad. But eventually things got so bad I was forced to give the National Death another try. After suitable inves- tigations I was told that one of my liver tests showed I was drinking. I was enraged. In the nine years since I had left hospital not so much as a liqueur chocolate had passed my lips. How could the test be positive? The specialist gave me one of those looks that, as a doctor, I so lightly used to bestow on my own patients. Alcohol is a common weakness and people who drink often deny it. Why waste time looking for anything else?
The time had come to do a Rupert Brooke. An island in the West Indies was looking for a medical officer. It would be a fine end. A year or two of work, then a simple headstone in a plantation with the darkies singing. Those who stayed at home would, now and then, look up from their operating tables, gestalt couches or PM slabs to envy my escape, a chap who went out before the first kiss of the mortgage broker withered his ideals. I went and recovered completely. I remained as well as I had been when, as a young 29-year- old, the illness first struck.
But when I came home to England it started again. The thought that it might be something I was eating made me uneasy. Doctors believe that people who think food can cause disease are not quite sound on essentials. Straightforward, no- nonsense third-world plagues like botulism or cholera maybe — you open your dodgy can of meat or drink your infected well water and you are on your way to the undertakers before you can say Ludwig Koch. But allergies to bacon and eggs? Open-sandalled rubbish.
Feeling vaguely disloyal, I began a food diary. Everything I ate went into the diary, matched against episodes of itching, fati- gue, swollen joints and vertigo. It was not long before two culprits emerged from the piles of old exercise books — apples and apple juice. Juice was easily the worst. A glass of apple juice would lay me low for six weeks.
From then on I was Adam with a reviewer's copy of the Book of Genesis. Within a month my symptoms abated. Within four I was normal. Delighted, I summoned up the nerve to mention this modest piece of self-serving research to colleagues. In the pained silence that fol- lowed I felt like a flat-earther who has gatecrashed a party at the Baikanour Cos- modrome. A senior boy took me aside to tell me to stop being such a rotter. What I had had was a prolonged attack of hepatitis that had just happened to go away at the same time as my 'research'. Why was it that a man of my intelligence etc? I shut my mouth.
But now we know about Alar, the farmer-friendly growth regulator. Since 1967 agrotechnologists have been spraying it on apple trees. By interfering with natural growth patterns Alar can guarantee a designer apple not less than 65mm and not more than 75mm in diameter and one that is of a certain redness. It sounds unattractive and it is. Supermarket apples taste like compressed, unwashed socks. Worse, critics claim that breakdown pro- ducts of Alar are powerful irritants that can cause cancer in animals. I rang Uniroyal, the manufacturers of Alar.
The man from Uniroyal was convincing. Nobody had been able to demonstrate that Alar causes anything more than some equivocal tumours in mice and even that evidence was seriously flawed. In fact, the Uniroyal chap told me, tap water, peanut butter, diet cola, mushrooms and beer offer far higher risks of cancer than Alar. For a child to reach the doses used to cause cancer in mice it would have to drink 4,000 gallons of apple juice a day. The Uniroyal man was gloomy. Alar, he said, was going to be the straw that broke the world pesticide industry's back. He was right. In March, because of public disquiet rather than any new scientific evidence, the US Environmental Protection Agency decided to schedule Alar for banning in 1990.
This all demonstrates the effects of rumour and reputation in commercial food preservation. For there are many other toxins sprayed on apples to make them attractive that could equally cause my idiosyncrasy and which people should be worried about. According to a highly unemotional source in the toxicology busi- ness — an industry surrounded by some rather breathless and politically motivated activities — 18 per cent of the chemicals used on fruits and foods can cause cancer, and about 40 per cent of foodstuffs have residues on testing. Children are particu- larly susceptible to such agents as their internal chemistry is not sufficiently de- veloped to neutralise toxins effectively, and, in the case of apple juice, their consumption can be 18 times greater than that of an adult per pound body weight. The same could be true of the sick, especially those with liver problems, of whom there may be over 100,000 sufferers in the United Kingdom. The thing is we just don't know enough about the chemi- cals we are using.
Such ignorance has not deterred the US chemical giant Monsanto. Recognising that chemical pesticides have had their day, the company decided on a bold leap into the darkness of genetic engineering. An off- shoot, Hu1st Research Farm Services of Hughson, California, has crossed a tomato with a bacterium. In the tomato's genetic code is incorporated a gene from the bacterium that kills caterpillars. It would be to us as if a staple food like a chicken suddenly came equipped with cobra's fangs.
Despite the inventor's assurances of the safety of this new tomato I do not think it a very good idea. Genetic tampering means that the characteristic is passed on from generation to generation. It is one thing to make a mistake with a chemical and then withdraw it, quite another to set about eliminating an entire species if it turns out to be dangerous.
This development is something that the pure food lobby should be paying rapt attention to. If they don't, it may well be that in 20 years, pursued by lethal bacteria that can whistle the opening bars of Figaro, we will look back at the Eighties as the golden age of the honest chemical pesti- cide. It will then be too late.
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