Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

St. Louis. (Roberts 1996). Also in the autumn of 1901, nine children
in Camden, New Jersey, died from tainted smallpox vaccine and
nine children in New Jersey died from contaminated smallpox
vaccine, setting the stage for the adoption of rigorous standards for
the emerging biological products industry.
A pamphlet produced by Bayer says ‘The innocuity of Aspirin is
absolute. No action on the stomach or the digestive tract.’
1902 The Biological Control Act passed in the US to ensure purity and
safety of serums, vaccines and similar products used to prevent or
treat diseases in humans. This required that biological drugs be
licensed and produced in licensed facilities and production
supervised by a qualified scientist. The Act was prompted by The
Medical Society of the District of Columbia following these deaths
(see above). The Hygienic Laboratory, forerunner of the National
Institutes of Health, was authorised to conduct regular inspections of
the establishments and to sample products on the open market for
purity and potency testing (FDA, 2006).
Barbital was first synthesized in 1902 by German chemists Emil
Fischer and Joseph von Mering. They published their discovery in
1903 and it was marketed in 1904 by the Bayer company as
Veronal. By 1913 it was implicated in fatal accidents and suicides. By
1950 barbiturates were established as ‘true’ drugs of addiction, but
they were known to cause habituation from 1941 (Medawar, 1992).
In 1979 the Committee on Review of Medicines (CRM) said they
should be reserved for severe cases of intractable insomnia.
Hirschberg describes anaphylaxis due to Aspirin (Hirschberg, 1902).
Charles Richet, in 1902, injected a dog with a dose of poison derived
from the tentacles of the actiniae and with no harmful effect
whatever. Twenty-two days later he reinjected the dog with exactly
the same dose, expecting to reach larger doses later and a condition
of prophylaxis to the poison. To his surprise, hardly had he finished
the injection when the animal became extremely ill and died in thirtyfive
minutes. This being the exact opposite of prophylaxis he called it
‘anaphylaxis’ (Coke, 1921). Richet described an experiment whereby
a watery extract of various tissues from an Egyptian mummy over
3,000 years old was made and injected into guinea-pigs, and a
month later it was found that these animals had been made
anaphylactic by means of human albumins (Richet, 1910).
1903 Acrodynia (Pink Disease) The first known case was presented at the
Cassel Congress, in 1903 although possible cases had been