The nation’s first botulism museum is nestled in an unassuming historic home in Peoria’s Moss Avenue neighborhood.
Botulism is a type of food poisoning caused by bacteria. The disease is extremely fatal if untreated, with a fatality rate upwards of 80%.
“It is the most poisonous thing known to man,” said Jane Talkington, botulism historian and curator of the Historical Botulism Museum. “It takes about 70 picograms, 70 trillionths of a gram, to kill a mouse. So there's nothing that comes close to that, not the sarin nerve agent, not VX, nothing in our recipe of toxicity.”
Talkington also works for the Turner School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Bradley University.
She spent around 10 years of her life writing a book, published in January, titled “Recognizing Botulism: New Insights From Old Narratives From 1902 to 1931.” The book’s 13 chapters each cover a different story about the destructive nature of botulism, from a 1902 outbreak in San Francisco to a Stanford sorority visited by the illness in 1913.
Talkington has 13 different pieces of art hanging around the Moss Avenue home, representing each of the stories in the book.
“When I moved into this house, it just felt like the perfect setup for a botulism museum,” she said. “I repurposed the artwork I had to tell the stories, so we have 13 exhibits hanging on the walls.”
Talkington says a story that’s perhaps most representative of the commonly fatal illness is that of a doctor in the Yukon Territory. The doctor oversaw an outbreak among 28 men, half of them lived and half of them died.
“[The doctor] wrote his dissertation on the outbreak, on his recovery, on the recovery of all the men. So we had 28 case studies in one era, in one outbreak. That was a tremendous contribution,” said Talkington.
Talkington said those studies happened in Canada, and botulism was broadly understood in Germany in the 1800s. However, the knowledge took longer to make its way to America and limited regulations on canning meant canned foods would continue to cause havoc in communities for decades.
She said some foods, like olives, with a limited number of sources in the states, were particularly susceptible to botulism bacteria contamination. Some of the changes to limit the spread included transitioning from cold packing canned goods to using heat to sterilize, as a result of studies at Stanford University in the 1920s.
“There’s that transition of technology, they didn’t quite crack the nut on that, so they produced a lot of poison food,” said Talkington.
The disease terrorized a 1920s population suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] after the end of World War I, and with memories of Spanish Flu still fresh in their mind.
“People didn’t know which canned goods had it. There was no taste and no smell to the toxins,” said Talkington. “So every meal, whether you’re by yourself or you’re with your entire family, there was a risk you had to take. But what else would you do? You had to eat.”
Though it’s not covered in Talkington’s book, as it occurred outside of the work’s specific time frame, Peoria had its own notably large botulism outbreak in 1983. The outbreak originated from contaminated onions served by a popular restaurant in Northwoods Mall at the time called the Skewer Inn.
“A lot of people ate there on Friday and Saturday night, and so thousands of people flooded the ERs trying to figure out if they were sick or they had the flu or they had botulism,” said Talkington. “Ultimately, 28 people were hospitalized for many months.”
No one died as a result of the outbreak, but Talkington said many didn’t return to work for a year or two. Some of them suffered symptoms of the debilitating illness that would follow them throughout their entire lives.
Today, Talkington says botulism is still regularly misdiagnosed. The symptoms of muscle paralysis and difficulty breathing are often conflated with more common conditions. This can lead to deaths, especially if a misdiagnosis means a patient doesn’t receive the antitoxin early.
“The symptoms are very hard to catch. They’re different. We might all have lunch together, but I’ll have different symptoms,” said Talkington. “So if we went to four different doctors, they would say you had one thing and I had something else and they would all four be wrong.”
The Historical Botulism Museum is open for guided tours on Saturdays by appointment at 405-714-1919. The 45-minute tour around 1311 W. Moss Avenue includes a copy of Talkington’s book and is $20 per person.
