Tested Tape

One of the most common medical procedures today is the skin test by means of which doctors tell whether a person is sensitive to ragweed, strawberries, horsehair, chicken feathers, scarlet fever, diphtheria or any other known allergen. The physician scrapes off a tiny area of the patient's skin, applies a drop or two of the allergic substance, covers the whole with a piece of adhesive plaster. Skin tests have preserved the health and lives of multitudes. They have also" served to reveal that about 1% of the population develops an eczema-like skin irritation solely from the adhesive tape used in covering the skin-test material.

The few U. S. concerns that manufacture surgical adhesive tape paid practically no attention to the dermatitis which their products occasionally cause until Surgeon General Hugh Smith Cumming of the U.S. Public Health Service ordered an investigation. Dr. Cumming appointed Dr. Louis Schwartz of his own staff to do the work and Professor Samuel Mortimor Peck, Manhattan dermatologist, to help. They published their report last week.

Drs. Schwartz and Peck first queried the most revered pharmaceutical chemist in the country, Frederick Barnett Kilmer, 83, head of Johnson & Johnson's laboratories at New Brunswick, N. J. since 1889. Mr. Kilmer told them that, as the result of his investigations, he considered the ingredients of adhesive tape not irritating as such; that the skin secretions are retained under the moisture-repellent coating with a resultant maceration of the epidermis. This, rather than idiosyncrasy, said Mr. Kilmer, is the most frequent cause of the irritation.

Drs. Schwartz and Peck found the manufacturers of adhesive tape as secretive about the ingredients and methods of manufacture as they are about the yearly yardage and dollar value of their plaster. Eventually the following list of ingredients became clear: rubber, rosin. "Burgundy" pitch, olibanum, beeswax, zinc oxide, anhydrous lanolin, starch, orris root.

Appropriate tests of those ingredients made separately on the skins of volunteers demonstrated that, apart from maceration and mechanical injury, rosins, pitch and smoke-cured wild rubber are the chief irritants. Complexion, previous skin diseases or a predisposition to shingles or other allergens apparently have nothing to do with the sensitivity to adhesive plaster found in one out of every hundred normal men, women & children.

Pointing a reproving finger at adhesive tape manufacturers, the Schwartz-Peck report to Surgeon General Gumming concludes: "Research in adhesive manufacture should make it possible to substitute non-irritating types of rosins and rubber for the present types."

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