End time news

Tastes in fire and brimstone have changed little since the medieval era. With the countries of the Bible lands threatening to destroy each other, religious zealots are anxious to see divine signs in secular events – the ‘end time’ of their convoluted theologies.
 

Many are keen to identify, in these troubled times, signs of divine intervention. These doom merchants are tearing out handfuls of red meat from the Bible and flinging it around.

It’s an unedifying spectacle – a bunch of people scrambling to save their own asses, while they denounce other churches and denominations, whose members, they confidently predict, are on the road to Hell. 

They mainly draw their vocabulary – the Fiery Lake, the Lamb of God, the Wrath, the Antichrist, the Mark of the Beast, the Book of Life, and so on – from some endlessy chewed over Biblical passages. They particularly partial to the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24-25, Revelation 4-22, Thessalonians 4 and parts of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all visualise versions of the of the end of the world, to maintain patriarchy and keep their adherents in line. Over the centuries, their intra-religious bickering has killed and maimed millions – not least in the Bible Lands.

The lesson of Lot 

Why can’t Jews and Christians follow the lesson of Lot, who is shown unfavourably in the Book of Genesis 13:11 selfishly grabbing the lush, fertile lands of the Jordon Valley from under Abraham’s nose. Why not drop vindictive dogma based on subjective textual interpretation and share life’s blessings? Be nice guys.

The Book of Revelation, which closes of the New Testament in a blood curdling finale, is a happy hunting ground for these Armageddon pedlars, who can identify a false prophet at the drop of the hat.

The imagery of Revelation, is suffused through western culture. We know the catch phrases. Most people don’t know the chronology, even if they have been to Sunday School, which focuses on tame and uncontroversial parables. Why would they?
The chronology goes as follows. After a low-key start, Revelation gets lively in chapter four, with opening of the seven seals (a seal is a scroll). This signals the beginning of the Tribulation. 

The seven seals 

The opening of the first seal (6:1) give us the four horsemen of the apocalypse – white, red, black and pale – the rider of the white one is sometimes identified as the Antichrist. That would be Pope Vincent, or Bill Gates. The sun turns black, the moon turns red, stars fall to earth (6:12). But this just an hors d’oeuvre.

When the seventh seal is opened, seven angels appear, and they blow on seven trumpets. See a pattern here? The first blast causes a hail made of fire and blood to burn up a third of the trees on the planet (8:17), the second turns a third of the sea into blood killing, everything that lives there and a third of all sailors – a bit arbitrary.=

When the fifth trumpet blows (9:1) Satan is given the key to the bottomless pit – a tactical manoeuvre on god’s part. The sky darkens and smoke and locusts issue from this fiery hole. Looking like armoured horses, with human faces and the sting of scorpions, the locusts torture the unrighteous for five months. Does God have anger issues? 

Armageddon outta here

With the sixth trumpet (9:13), God unleashes four wrathful angels who slaughter a third of the human race. He hasn’t finished yet. As a final gesture, he tips out seven bowls of wrath, which bring about seven plagues – festering sores, rivers and seas turned do blood, a blazing sun that shrivels flesh – more torture, on an industrial scale.

It’s the main event – Armageddon – rounded off by the biggest earthquake ever seen that reduces a city to ruins – it could be Jerusalem, Rome, or Babylon depending on your preference. As parting short, God rains down forty kilogram hailstones.

A new player appears and ends the Tribulation – a rider on a white horse, leading the armies of heaven (19: 11-16). ‘He treads the wine press of the fury of God’. He is the King of Kings. It’s the Second Coming! The tide is turning. Satan is ‘bound’ bringing about a thousand years of peace and righteousness begin (20:2). Righteous people who have died are resurrected.

 After a thousand years are up. Satan is released from Hell (20:7). He summons a force as numberless as the sand on the seashore. There is another one-sided bust-up. Satan is thrown into a lake of burning sulphur, where he will burn forever (20:10). Next, God, on his white throne, opens up the Book of Judgement on the living and the dead (20:11). A second resurrection occurs. Even those in Hell are given a chance (13). The Holy City, a New Jerusalem appears (21:1) in which the righteous will dwell forever. It’s the end of the end days. 

The crux of the matter

So, here’s the crucial point, theologically, for end of the world watchers. Have these events – the Tribulation, the seals, trumpets and bowls, Armageddon, the Second Coming, the Day of Judgement happened, are happening now or they yet to happen? Oceans of ink have been expended on these issues – a dismal swamp of exegesis. Over many centuries, proponents of theological turf wars have developed their own shorthand.

For ‘full preterists’ the events recounted in Revelation occurred in the past, including the Final Judgement. Far more common, for Protestant churches, is ‘partial preterism’. This is the vanilla option. Under this scenario, the nasty stuff has already happened – the violent retribution of Revelation from 4 to 19. It corresponds to the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in AD70 – thus, it was all the Jews’ fault. The nice stuff – the Second Coming and the Day of Judgement – haven’t happed yet. It’s just a matter of saying one’s prayers and waiting. Who knows for how long.

Then we have the full-colour futurists. Their creed is modern. It originated in the nineteenth century, took off like wildfire with the radio preaching of the 1920 and came to dominate US Protestantism in the 1970s, with the rise of Baptist and Presbyterian Churches, whose slick Bible thumping preachers dispensed old-fashioned fire and brimstone on TV. Their lapel-grabbing, no holds barred style travelled back across the pond to the UK, to the horror of the sherry sipping clerisy.

Futurists maintain that we are still awaiting the Tribulation or that we are in it – citing modern diseases and nuclear weapons as God’s signs. It’s the Apocalyptic, socially conservative religion of the red Republican states. Many adherents are ‘dispensationalist’. That is, they believe in the literal truth of the Bible.

Aerial event

They like the idea of rapture (Thessalonians 4) in which the resurrected and living faithful will mingle in the clouds in an ‘aerial event’. Their hell is not metaphorical but real and it is eternal. Key to their ‘dispensational premillennialism’ is a ‘pre-Tribulation rapture’.

That’s important to them. The rapture, deemed to be vulgar by Catholics and other Protestants, can happen at any time. Being pre-Tribulation means that those who have accepted Jesus into their lives – the bar for entry into their church is low – will be spared the plagues of boils, scorpion stings and angelic slaughter that will engulf the rest of us.

The Jews may not enjoy this free pass. But ultimately, they believe, the good ones, unlike Moslems and members of doctrinally unsound Protestant churches, will earn a place in heaven, after a bit of chastening punishment from the man upstairs.

Contradictory positions

Never accuse the Catholics of shying away from simultaneously holding two contradictory positions. The Church of Rome has promoted both preterist and futurist theology in its history. It was a defence mechanism. For centuries, Protestants said the Pope was the Antichrist (Revelation 13:7). It this part of the Bible happened before the Catholic church began, or would happen in the future, the Pope couldn’t be the bad guy, could he? It’s a great example of creative ambiguity.

Is any of this stuff true? Of course not. It’s nonsense, dating from the time of a geocentric view of the universe and the burning of witches. The Jehovah’s Witness confidently predicted the return of Christ to earth in 1914. Some of them believe that Satan and his demons were cast down to earth in that year and that he rules the current world order.

 Everyone should just grow up. The preachers should get proper jobs. Those proclaiming Biblical evidence of Armageddon are stirring up hatred and helping to bring it about through their very actions – a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe that is their intention.

The gentle art of faking

The six-day Glasgow meat trial of 1889 was a milestone in public health. It led to the enhanced inspection of abattoirs. But fraud, truth denial and producer prioritisation delayed the effective regulation of the meat and dairy industries for many decades. 

On the 9th of May 1889, Peter Fyfe, who had been appointed as Glasgow City Council’s chief sanitary inspector in 1885, saw something troubling in the city’s Moore Street slaughterhouse. Two carcasses showed red discolouration and contained nodules well known to indicate the presence of tuberculosis. He duly seized and condemned the carcasses from their sellers, Hugh Couper and Charles Moore, judging them unfit for human consumption.

This state of the meat that he had found was by no means unusual. The barely regulated abattoirs of Victorian Britain were disgusting by modern standards. Animals were packed into filthy, overcrowded pens and killed within sight of each other. There was no legal requirement for post or antemortem animal inspection. Diseased cuts and offal from emaciated, often decomposing carcasses were consumed by the poor, who relied on cheap meat for their meagre diets. Awareness of animal diseases and their zoonotic effects was limited. 

In addition, many scams were prevalent in the meat trade. Norwich sanitary inspector, Bernard Penny, wrote of butchers in The Sanitary Journal in March, 1910: “These gentlemen are past masters of the gentle art of faking and can dress a dead lamb or calf and clean up an old cow or a weedy steer in a marvellous manner. What with the inflation of veal and lamb (misdescription of cheaper meat) and stripping and cleaning of beasts, it often takes very careful inspection to detect anything wrong.”

Milk was also a nutritional staple of the poor, particularly for children and infants. But dairies and cowsheds were as unhygienic as abattoirs, so the purity of milk could not be relied upon, and it was often watered down. It was a serious public health issue. Infected milk was a primary cause of streptococcal infection, typhoid, scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as tuberculosis.

Over the Victorian period, protective legislation, which was some of the first in the world, slowly caught up as urban populations swelled in size. UK statutes on food composition, powers to seize and condemn foodstuffs and laws to clean up cowsheds and dairy herds appeared from the middle of the century. They were enforced by medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors. However, in his bold enforcement action of 1889, Peter Fyfe, a prolific writer and lecturer, who devoted his life to improving housing, air quality and food safety in Glasgow, was going out on a limb, pushing the law to its limits.

The science of tuberculosis

It makes sense that if food stinks it will make you ill. But links between bacteria and disease were still being discovered. German pioneer microbiologist Robert Koch had identified the bacterium causing tuberculosis – a milestone of medical science – in 1882. It was known that both cows and cattle contracted TB. In humans, TB, which was untreatable, was ubiquitous in over-crowded slums. Called phthisis, then consumption, this scourge of the poor was dreaded under another name, ‘the white plague’. It is thought to have been responsible for a quarter of human deaths in the nineteenth century – but, in 1889, a link between bovine and human forms of the disease had yet to be conclusively established.

Fyfe and other sanitary inspectors were convinced that TB did transmit from the milk and meat of cattle, causing a massive toll of human illness and death. They were extremely concerned by the extent of TB in Britain’s beef and dairy herds – it was estimated that a fifth of cows were affected by the disease – but felt that their hands were tied behind their back. Legislation was patchy. The Public Health Act 1875 (1867 in Scotland) allowed unsound meat and animals to be seized, for the first time, by local authorities but the powers were sparingly applied.

Angered by an injustice, Fyfe, who was a chess player and dramatist, as well as a health campaigner, asked eloquently in The Sanitary Journal in 1910: “Who can calculate the mass of human suffering, the numberless army of pale-faced pilgrims in their weary march to the consumptive’s grave, whose painful progress from birth to death has been caused by a draught of disease bearing milk?”.

In practice, in rural areas, the meat trade was dealt with leniently by magistrates, who often had close connections to farmers, while urban authorities were hugely under-resourced and they had to tackle slum housing and poor air quality and seek to reduce the spread a host of communicable diseases, as well as cleaning up the food chain. In 1911, Manchester's sanitary department employed only 100 staff for a city of 1.5 million people. Rotting and pathogenic food was a major health menace. Sanitary inspectors annually seized and destroyed hundreds of tonnes of unfit mean, fish shellfish and fruit and vegetable.

Then as now, vested interest in the food chain were implacably opposed to reform. The farmers, abattoirs, wholesalers and butchers providing the nation’s meat did not want even emaciated and diseased carcasses to be removed from the food chain.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, other countries, notably the USA, had successfully cleaned up their cattle and dairy herds. But the UK lagged behind. Farmers vigorously objected to a system requiring them to certify their animals as healthy and opposed pasteurisation – a life-saving measure which was well understood by the beginning of the century. To support this stance, they denied that infected milk or animal products caused tuberculosis and other illnesses in humans – lobbying issues that contributed, in 1908, to the formation of the National Farmers' Union.  

Need for vigilance

Because the economic stakes were so high, Fyfe’s seizure of two grossly diseased carcasses in Glasgow led to an important test case The butchers involved – Couper and Moore, contested his action. This triggered a six-day trial, heard in May and June 1899, in which both sides called numerous witnesses. 

The trial was extensively reported, well beyond the medical and trade press. The defence maintained that, as only parts of the carcasses were diseased, they should not have been seized. The prosecution argued, citing studies that were still not universally accepted, that science had shown that the presence of the tubercular bacillus in part of an animal would render the whole dangerous.

The case went well for Fyfe – the judge found in Glasgow’s favour. Following this verdict, councils with meat inspectors, including Liverpool, Belfast, Leeds and Newcastle now began to seize whole carcasses with localised signs of disease – a measure that must have saved many lives. 

Eliminating diseased carcasses at the end of food chain was effective in cleaning up herds. It also circumvented the many tricks of the trade of the meat trade to pass off sub-standard products as safe to eat. Outraged butchers lobbied their MPs and the Board of Agriculture, complaining that they would be driven out of business.

Delighted by the verdict, The Lancet wrote that the sale of tuberculous meat is now “illegal …. even where disease is limited in distribution and the carcass otherwise apparently sound”. The Meat Trades Journal pronounced the judgment to be “momentous”. However, these conclusions proved to be premature. Battles between town and country, regulated and regulator were to continue, and the science of tuberculosis was not settled.

At the instigation of the Local Government Board, a Royal Commission on tuberculosis in animals was commissioned in 1896 It called for meat inspectors to be trained and qualified in animal pathology, but fudged the contamination issue. A second Royal Commission was set up in 1901. Its work dragged on for a decade, further delaying clarity.

The Public Health (Meat) Regulations, which set standards for slaughterhouse inspection and consolidated local authority powers, did not come into force until 1924. As we have seen in another blog (The battle for safe milk) regulation of the dairy industry was also delayed for many decades. Many private bills requiring the certification of dairy herds, some introduced by the London County Council, were successfully blocked by land owning and farming interests.

Edith Summerskill’s Milk (Special Designations) Act systematically tackling sick herds and ushering in widespread pasteurisation, was not passed until 1949 – one of the most costly to life and egregious delays in UK public health history. Pasteurisation did not become compulsory in Scotland until 1983 and in England, Wales and Norther Ireland two years later.

The Glasgow meat case is interesting because it illustrates themes that always apply to regulation. Science evolves and is subject to interpretation and regulators and the regulated often have incompatible agendas. The worst hygiene horrors of the Victorian era may have passed into history, but new and novel threats will aways emerge and fraud will never disappear. 

Fyfe was feted in his city and was to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His successfully pursued case has much to teach us about the need for vigilance in public health and for precautionary, impartial science-based practice, based on the best available understanding. These principles are too often forgotten, ignored or compromised by politicians.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.