Hidden Killers Of The Victorian Home Page #2

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mustard

to give it an authentic

mustard colour

without having to actually include

too much of the real ingredient,

which is expensive.

Tea is adulterated with everything

from iron filings, to dust,

to used tea leaves, then black lead

to make it look black.

Green tea has Prussian blue in it.

I mean, they're pretty lethal.

Sir Arthur Hill Hassall,

a London-based physician,

identified adulteration

in 2,500 products

and published his results

in the Lancet.

This led to the first wave

of legislation in 1868.

The food adulteration laws

were not very strong

when they were initially put in,

and they were not particularly

effective either.

People simply continued

because it was very difficult

to police,

it was very difficult to prove.

And even after it is known about,

even after Ackham and Hassall

start to publicise food adulteration,

people just simply don't know what

adulterated food looks like

versus non-adulterated food.

So you might know that your bread is

probably adulterated,

but either you don't have a choice

or you just assume blithely

that it happens to other people.

Bread adulteration might ultimately

kill you

because of malnutrition,

but there was a greater,

more immediate danger that was

part of every child's diet.

For the Victorians, milk was a cheap

and important source of calcium.

A healthy food, it was thought.

However, in 1882,

20,000 milk samples were tested

and revealed that one-fifth

had been adulterated.

A clue as to what was going on

came from the domestic goddess

of her day, Mrs Beeton.

The Victorians sought advice

on all manner of things,

and when it came to food,

Mrs Beeton was their guru.

According to the 1888 edition of

her Book Of Household Management,

"Milk", she said,

"could be purified by preparations

"of which the principal constituent

is boracic acid,"

and she adds, "It is said that most

of the milk that comes to London

"is treated in this way."

She concludes,

"Fortunately for the consumer,

"it is a quite harmless addition."

But was it as harmless

as Mrs Beeton believed?

Microbiologist Matthew Avison

has devised an experiment

that tests Mrs Beeton's advice.

Boracic acid was a component

of a product called borax,

an alkali which was used

during the Victorian period

to prolong the life of milk.

This milk doesn't taste very nice,

so you would throw it away.

The Victorians would say, "That's

a waste, so let's do something to it

"that removes the sour taste",

and what they would have done

is added alkalis.

When fresh, milk has a neutral

pH measurement of around seven,

but over time, as it sours or spoils

and becomes contaminated

with bacteria,

it becomes more acidic

and its pH measurement drops.

So the Victorians worked out,

probably by trial and error,

that if you add alkali to this,

it would neutralise the acid

and I've calculated that that will

neutralise the acid in this milk,

so just give it a bit of a shake

and then we'll show, hopefully,

that it gives a pH closer to neutral.

So you can see this has gone back to

6.6, which is approximately neutral.

It's neutralised the acid, it's now

made this milk palatable again.

This new wonder alkali,

sold in the shops as borax,

was so popular it became

a staple of the Victorian larder.

But alarmingly, borax wasn't

only used to treat milk -

it was also marketed

as a wonderfully versatile product,

as I found when I read

the journals of the time.

I'm just looking at these ads

and there's a sketch from 1893

and there's this absolutely

extraordinary one-page ad -

"Californian Household Treasure."

It says, "It's absolutely pure

and absolutely safe.

"It possesses qualities

that are exceptional

"and unknown to any other substance

and it purifies water,

"destroys bacilli..."

It promises everything.

In fact, borax promised too much -

as well as "purifying" milk,

it was brilliant at cleaning

your bath and your loo.

So what happened when borax

ended up in the body?

borax, or sodium borate,

if inhaled or ingested,

can cause severe irritation.

So if it's swallowed, it can cause

abdominal pain, nausea,

vomiting, diarrhoea.

If you have a large amount of it,

it will start to affect

other organs,

like the brain and the kidneys.

And if you have enough,

it can prove fatal.

But just how much borax is harmful?

I've added a small amount of borax

to neutralise the acid in this milk,

but of course, if you had a pint

of milk you'd need more borax,

so I calculated that you need

this much borax to neutralise

a pint of milk that has gone sour.

This is five grams

and, according to some people,

five grams is sufficient

to potentially kill a small child.

So the addition of borax was not

as harmless as Mrs Beeton suggested.

Enough of it could kill.

But by reducing the acid

in the spoiled milk

and disguising the sour taste,

borax was concealing

another deadly threat.

The real problem is, it doesn't

get rid of the bacteria,

the underlying cause of the acid,

and those bacteria could

still kill people.

Bacteria like brucella,

which causes undulating fever,

it's a nasty fever that can

go on for weeks at a time,

that's not particularly lethal,

but what would be lethal would be TB.

The bovine TB bacterium

is present in cow's milk

and this is what was able

to flourish undetected in the milk

with devastating effects.

Bovine TB, it's not the same TB that

would cause the coughing symptoms

that we associate with TB,

but what's called non-pulmonary TB,

which spreads out

into the extremities,

includes damage to internal organs,

damage to the bones, and particularly

problematic in children.

What other effects could

drinking milk contaminated

with the bovine TB bacterium have?

Bovine TB could also cause damage

to the bones in the spine.

For example,

it could cause an abscess

in the bones of the spinal column

which would soften the bone,

which would then collapse

to form a wedge shape.

And if several of these vertebrae

collapsed at once,

it could cause

massive deformity of the spine.

This woman was actually particularly

lucky because her TB damaged

only the bones of the spine

and not the spinal cord itself.

If the abscess had tracked and burst

backwards into the spinal column,

it would have compressed the spinal

cord and caused paralysis at best

or death at worst.

Effectively, purifying this according

to the standards of Mrs Beeton

is like removing the bio-hazard tape

and now, it's basically pot luck

as to whether we have something that

is contaminated and could kill us

or something that is not contaminated

and is safe to drink.

Adding borax to milk allowed bovine

TB bacteria to grow undetected,

exposing a generation

to a lethal infectious disease.

It's estimated that virtually

all children were exposed to

Bovine TB at some time during

their upbringing, and it's known

that many of those children

succumbed to that infection.

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