Valuable Gadfly

Gadfly. Definition: a usually intentionally annoying person who stimulates or provokes others, especially by persistent, irritating criticism. Example: Sidney Wolfe, director of Ralph Nader's Health Research Group.

Wolfe's sting has been felt mostly by Washington bureaucrats. For the past seven years, the 41-year-old doctor has been buzzing around federal agencies, urging them to take action on health issues. These range from banning cancer-causing chemicals from food supplies and the workplace to removing hazardous drugs from the market and warning the public about the dangers of unnecessary surgery, excessive X rays and liquid protein diets.

The gadfly has drawn blood. William Cray of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association accuses him of zealotry: "He tends to exploit every negative aspect of drug therapy to scare the consumer." Still, many Washington officials are beginning to develop a wary respect for Wolfe. Admits Donald Kennedy, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration: "Sometimes when I've been annoyed at Sid, I realized that I was really annoyed at myself for not seeing a problem to be as serious as I should have at first look. In the past the tendency was not to question the fruits of technology."

Wolfe has been finding wormholes in those fruits ever since college. Intending to become a chemical engineer, he worked one summer at a company that produced hydrofluoric acid, which is used in etching glass and other processes. Wolfe found that the acid etched human skin as well; he often left work covered by first-degree burns. That experience helped turn him toward a medical career. At Cleveland's Western Reserve University, Wolfe studied under famed Pediatrician Benjamin Spock who, he says, "made it very clear that it is not possible to understand people's health problems without understanding the circumstances from which they come." Those circumstances include job and living conditions, as well as diet--all ongoing concerns of the Health Research Group.

In 1968, Wolfe, then a National Institutes of Health researcher, began working with Nader. Three years later, they collaborated on a letter to the FDA warning that many bottles of intravenous fluid were contaminated with bacteria that had caused 150 cases of infection and nine deaths. They protested that the FDA's proposed solution--continued use of the bottles with added precautions--was shockingly inadequate. Two days later the agency issued a recall of millions of contaminated bottles.

Encouraged by that success, Wolfe turned his attention to public-health hazards that he felt were not being dealt with promptly or vigorously enough by federal agencies. His alarms, sometimes strident but usually accompanied by sound documentation, have resulted in a remarkable string of Government actions affecting the use of suspected or proven cancer-causing substances. Among them:

> The Labor Department's 1973 declaration of zero tolerance levels in industry for ten widely used chemicals, including benzidine and beta-naphthylamine.

> The FDA, EPA and Consumer Product Safety Commission's 1974 ban on the use as a propellant of vinyl chloride, shown to be the cause of a rare form of liver cancer, from a host of aerosol products.

> The FDA'S January 1976 ban on the use of Red Dye No. 2 as a food coloring.

> The FDA removal of chloroform from cough medicines and toothpaste in 1976.

During the past two years, Wolfe has taken his cases directly to the top. In April 1977, he alerted HEW Secretary Joseph Califano to existing FDA records linking phenformin, a drug used by one-fifth of all diabetics taking oral medication, to bad reactions in 190 cases and 93 deaths. Califano responded by invoking the "imminent hazard" law, which had never before been used, and banned the substance. Only last month, following another letter from Wolfe, Califano issued a sweeping warning about the dangers of DES, a drug once given to pregnant women to help prevent miscarriages that has since been shown to produce cancer or genital disorders in these women and their offspring.

Wolfe and his nine-member staff work on a meager $148,000-a-year budget in a cramped and rundown Washington office. On the door is a sign in Latin: POPULUS IAMDUDUM DEFUTATUS EST (The people have been getting screwed long enough). Putting in ten-hour days, Wolfe is currently involved in a study of surgeons' fees in Washington, D.C., a stepped-up antismoking campaign, and warnings on estrogen.

At home, Wolfe practices what he preaches: he gave up cigarettes eight years ago, and avoids saccharine-sweetened drinks and processed foods. Like Nader, he avoids the party circuit. Nevertheless, he has become an accepted part of the Washington scene, not so much a noisome pest as a comforting, if disquieting, presence. Even FDA Commissioner Kennedy says of his nemesis: "If we didn't have Wolfe around, our society would be poorer for it."

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