Potato Salad

One blistering morning last week some 1,000 employes of the Chevy Chase and Chestnut Farms dairies, their wives, children and sweethearts crowded gaily aboard the steamer Charles Macalester and set off down the Potomac from Washington for an outing. Soon after noon they went ashore at Marshall Hall, ate a luncheon of ham and cheese sandwiches, potato salad, deviled eggs, milk, tea, watermelon, ice cream & cake. Two hours later a child collapsed. Parents warned their children to keep out of the sun. Then men & women began to feel ill. Directors of the picnic mustered most of them aboard the steamer, ordered Captain John H. Turner to return to Washington.

Soon after that a Miss Bertie Reardon saw a woman go to the rail, said to her girl friend: "I'll bet she's getting seasick." Then the girl friend got sick. Said Miss Reardon: "Pretty soon women all around me began to get up and go to the rail. And then they'd stay there and other people would push them aside. And one man got real sick and just leaned his head over, and then everybody started to do that. People were lying all around on chairs looking like they were dead."

Captain Turner "almost busted a boiler," steamed up the river at 20 m. p. h. People writhed on the deck, lay panting below, gasping, retching, vomiting. Captain Turner steered close to the dock at Alexandria, six miles from Washington, shouted his news as he went by. Alexandrians called the Washington police. Every ambulance in the city, fire trucks, patrol wagons, taxicabs and private cars rushed to the wharf. The Charles Macalester steamed in, her decks packed with sick, prostrate picnickers. Children wailed, women sobbed. A woman on the dock became hysterical, had to be led away. Stretcher bearers, walking carefully on the horrid decks, bore away 54 of those who could not walk. Doctors & nurses gave first aid on the wharf, poked patients into ambulances. Some 200 others were placed into trucks & cars, hustled to hospitals. The steamer went back for those who had refused to return early, found many of them ill. Doctors went to the Bonus Army's camp at Anacostia, where some leftover picnic boxes had been sent, treated a score of veterans who had eaten before being warned. That night more than 150 excursionists slept in hospitals, some 200 others were recovering at home. Food Poisoning-- Washington's hospitals recorded the cases as "ptomaine poisoning." Physicians blamed the potato salad and deviled eggs, which had been prepared the night before. It was the second wholesale case of poisoning from potato salad within the week. At Massillon, Ohio, 200 delegates to the Ohio State Communist convention collapsed in a hall after eating salad prepared in a galvanized tub. More than 100 of the Communists went to the hospital, 50 others were laid on Boy Scout cots, treated on the hospital lawn.

It is not likely that either Washington's or Massillon's victims had ptomaine poisoning. Ptomaines (from ptoma, a corpse) are basic chemical substances derived from the decay of animal or vegetable proteins. They appear in food substances only in the later stages of putrefaction. True ptomaine poisoning is almost unknown. The use of the term is a survival of the period when physicians believed that bacteria produced their injurious effects by means of basic alkaloid-like products. Now it is known that the bacteria themselves cause the trouble.

What is commonly called "ptomaine poisoning" is poisoning from foods which contain putrefactive bacteria. Fish and vegetables are more likely to be infected than meat or fruit. Soup is less liable to contain the bacteria. Infection may result from contamination during preparation as well as from age and exposure. Symptoms appear in from two to 72 hours. There are severe gastric pains, headache, nausea. Vomiting will bring relief in mild cases, hence an emetic is the first treatment, followed by castor oil, epsom salts or an enema. In severe cases prolonged illness with typhoid-like symptoms may result.

Potatoes normally contain about .06% of a poison principle called solanin. In potatoes which have lain partly above ground during growth or have sprouted during storage the solanin content may increase to a point where the potatoes are unfit to eat. Symptoms of potato poisoning are similar to those of ordinary food poisoning: chills, fever, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, such as Washington's picnickers experienced last week.

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