Mad-honey poisoning is linked to a flower

Question: How has eating honey, that prototypical "health food," been known to bring armies to a sickening halt?

Answer: Travel back to 400 B.C. when Persian King Artaxeres II defeated an army of Greek mercenaries. Retreating, the soldiers pitched camp on hills covered with rhododendrons and feasted on nearby honeycombs and honey, says Dr. Joe Schwarcz in "The Fly in the Ointment."

Soon (by the general's journal) the men lost their senses, vomited and couldn't stand up. The "mad honey" effect didn't last long, he wrote. The soldiers recovered within 24 hours.

Today certain emergency hospitals post signs reminding physicians that "mad honey" poisoning can resemble a heart attack. Turns out that nectar from flowers of the rhododendron family can contain "grayanotoxins," causing weakness, slow heart beat, perspiration and nausea — like a heart attack.

In Turkey, hospitals still report cases of such poisoning, with complaints starting an hour after a person eats at least 50 grams of honey. "Sometimes atropine is needed to boost the heart rate and in rare cases a pacemaker has been temporarily installed." Most poisonings can be traced to producers with only a few hives, says Dr. Joe, so the average consumer's risk is remote, because commercial producers pool the product from many sources, diluting any grayanotoxins.

Question: When was the last time the United States got around to "cleaning up its act," as many people gave up drinking, cut back on smoking, reined in their libido?

Answer: Odd as it might sound, reforms of this sort have been cyclical, on roughly an 80-year period, says Indiana University applied health scientist Ruth C. Engs, author of "Clean Living Movements."

Wind the clock back 80 years or so to the 1920s and national Prohibition was in force, and 80 years before that was state-mandated Prohibition of the 1850s. "It didn't work then and it didn't work in the 1920s and it isn't working now for those under 21 years."

Every 80 years or so, we Americans go through a clean- up-society movement: don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs or be promiscuous. Caught up in this, we pass laws that are forgotten 30 years later, setting the stage for a renewal of the cycle, says Engs. The cultural forces operating in human society have their predictable patterns of waxing and waning, making it seem as if morality were pegged to the year on the calendar.

Question: There's no magic in the number 7, but it does have an uncanny way of turning up places. Such as where?