When Beer Brought the Blues

The 39-year-old Quebec stevedore complained of stomach pains, weight loss, nausea, shortness of breath and a cough. Most frightening of all, his face had turned a morbid blue-grey. Doctors suspected a severe vitamin deficiency, but when 49 identical cases appeared within seven months in the Quebec area, they questioned their first diagnosis.

Twenty of the patients died, some within 24 hours after entering the hospital. Autopsies revealed crippling damage to the heart muscle and also the liver. Searching for some common denominator, Drs. Yves Morin, Andre Tetu and Gaston Mercier found that they all drank an uncommon amount of beer--a Rabelaisian average of twelve quarts a day.

Cobalt in the Head. The brand that they favored was Dow, a Canadian beer brewed in Montreal and Quebec. But no problem had been encountered in Montreal. What was the difference be tween the two brewing processes? In Quebec, an extra dose of a cobalt salt had been added to build and hold the beer's foamy head. When? One month before the first patient's symptoms appeared. Though the amount of cobalt was well below legal levels, and though no conclusive cause-effect proof could be made, Dow dumped $1,260,000 worth of the suds into the sewer and eliminated the cobalt from the beer's ingredients. The incidence of cases immediately dropped to zero.

One month later, the same strange symptoms, complete with blue facial mottling, were reported from Omaha. There was a total of 64 cases, with 30 deaths. The stricken Americans were not such heavy hoisters as the Canadians, but they did average a six-pack a day. Quebec's Dr. Morin Hew to Omaha. Sure enough, a check with a local brewery turned up cobalt. It was eliminated and so was the disease.

Unclear Process. In reporting en the two outbreaks before the New York Academy of Sciences last week, Dr. Morin and Dr. James Sullivan of Oma ha's Creighton University still hesitated to blame cobalt absolutely. The heart-muscle damage was indeed characteristic of the poisoning effects of cobalt buildup. But none of the victims had actually consumed enough cobalt to poison a normal person. The doctors theorized that the patients' alcoholic habits had in some way lessened their systems' ability to handle the added chemical.

But the physicians are still anxious to discover exactly how the debilitating process works. A "good beer drinker" himself, Dr. Sullivan pointed out that not a single case was reported among any brewery employees, although they are allowed to wet their whistles while they work. In recent months, Dr. Sullivan has been trying to induce the disease in rats by feeding them cobalt-laced beer. Unfortunately, he reports, "our beer-drinking rats are the fattest, happiest rats around."

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