1. Inspector Dwight Ringhausen has reviewed your November 23, 1971 memo and attempted to answer the questions it raised to the best of his ability under these circumstances.

2. You must recall that this district was asked to issue a Notice of Hearing to a Mr. Jim Atcheson for offering cattle to a slaughterhouse, the liver of which contained 6.5 ppb DES. Mr. Ringhausen's visit to Iroquois, S.D. was for the sole purpose of verifying these facts prior to the issuance of that Notice of Hearing. Mr. Ringhausen's visit did disclose that the man's name was James Aitchison and that this individual had offered sheep for slaughter and not cattle.

Iroquois, S. D. is in the middle of nowhere; we have no man in the state; and, consequently, any further followup would place an undue burden upon existing DEN-FO inspectional manpower.

3. We do not believe the situation warrants any more work.

W.A. Graham

W. A. GRAHAM

Food and Drug Officer

In his memo dated November 23, 1971, John C. Evans, Food and Drug Officer, requested the following answers:

SUBJECT: Comments, as you requested, on Mitchell, Neumann, and Draper,
"Metabolism of tritium-labelled diethylstilbestrol by steers",
Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Vol. 7, No. 7, 509-512, July 1959.

In this article no results are presented which would allow one to judge how long it takes for tissue levels of diethylstilbestrol to become arbitrarily low once an animal has been taken off a regular feed containing diethylstilbestrol. What results are shown, however, are important in bringing out that some proportion of diethylstilbestrol will still be present in the animal for at least 10 days following ingestion.

The study made is subject to the limitations of being conducted on only
2 animals, one receiving a single oral dose of labeled diethylstilbestrol,
the other receiving the stilbestrol in feed over an 11 day period. In
the latter case, the animal was slaughtered only 27 hours after the last
feeding and the resulting data could give no information on reductions
in tissue levels that would occur with more prolonged periods following
discontinuance of diethystilbestrol. Further, since the animal had not
been on diethylstilbestrol for an extended period there could be no way
of getting at the possibility that diethystilbestrol accumulation might
occur in tissues from which it would not be readily released.

What the report does show is that for both animals some 50% of administered
stilbestrol was recovered from feces and urine (and from rumen and intes-
tine contents in the slaughtered animal ).
animal nearly all recovery was in the first 3 days, but there was continued
In the case of the single-dose
recovery of small amounts in the next, 3 days. For the daily stilbestrol-
fed animal total recovery from feces and urine increased continually each
day up till the tenth, although for urine alone the peak was achieved
between days 4 and 5 (which the authors indicate may mean attainment of a
threshold level in tissue retention.)

When the animal was slaughtered 27 hours after last feeding, only a small
fraction of a percent of administered diethystilbestrol was recovered from
the tissues. Lean meat and fat levels were 0.30 and 0.35 ppb, but there
was accumulation in particular tissues, 9.12 ppb in liver, 4.15 ppb in
kidney. Meat levels were so low that some 8960 pounds of meat would have
to be consumed to provide 1 mg of stilbestrol
below the
these levels were well
ppb level detectable by biological assay. About another 10%