Beef & the Man . . .

Readers of Rio de Janeiro's daily Ultima Hora (circ. 135.000) are no strangers to sensation, but even they were shaken to their gonads by the blaring headline: TERROR IN BRAZIL MEN FEMINIZED.

Cause of the panic was the allegation that men had been feminized by eating beef of steers fattened with the aid of a female hormonal substance, stilbestrol. The Tribuna do Povo reported that husky Sebastiao de Lima Serra of Aragatuba, 500 miles north of Rio, had suffered a "veritable metamorphosis, turning into a docile, falsetto-voiced creature of strange customs." Serra blamed his plight on the hormone-treated beef. Rio's state government proclaimed: "The necessary measures will be taken to end this evil."

Before competent authorities could decide whether there was any evil to end, cariocas had the jitters. Sales of beef dropped 40% in Rio, as much as 80% in other cities, and the price of tenderloin plummeted from 50-c- a pound to 3-c-. Millions of Brazilians took to a fish diet.

Was there anything to it ? Probably not, because only a minute proportion of Brazil's beeves have been fattened with the aid of hormones. And when the job is done right, by adding stilbestrol (or a related synthetic, hormone-like substance) in doses of ten milligrams daily to each animal's feed, nearly all the hormone is metabolized or passes through the digestive tract. Virtually none can ever be found in the meat if the hormone feeding is stopped (as required under U.S. regulations) 48 hours before slaughter.

But two Brazilian medical researchers, Drs. Jorge Vaitsman and Jefferson Andrade dos Santos, kept the steak furor sizzling by reporting that they had fed hormone-treated meat to animals with startling results: spayed females went into heat again, and normal males became infertile or impotent. The researchers forgot to mention how much free hormone was left in the feed. But there was another bogy: in an alternate method, hormone pellets are implanted in the steer's ear or neck for gradual absorption. From the neck, unabsorbed pellets might slip into an edible cut and thence into an unsuspecting customer.

Desperate to put down the local alarm, authorities in Rio insisted that there was no danger in Brazil but plenty in the U.S. where hormone fattening is standard practice. Trouble with this argument: U.S. authorities have not turned up a single proven case of enough hormone getting through to have any detectable effect. Last week Director Jayme Lins de Almeida of the Brazilian government's Institute of Animal Biology announced that he was starting "rigorous official experiments" to find out who is right.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.