Oddly enough, I was just looking at the way salicylic acid is metabolized - part of looking at how that happens with acetylsalicylic acid (AKA aspirin). Normally, about 10% of serum salicylic acid is excreted though the kidneys - but this percentage goes up as the blood becomes more alkaline. So... bicarbonate of soda as a potential antidote?

Also, one preservative that's added to beer is non-toxic and people seem to like the taste: hops. IPA is so named because it took a double dose of hops to preserve beer/ale through the sea voyage to India.

Great series! Keep it up, please :-)

Oh, as a very peripherally related side note: that Bulletin #13 is available online thanks to the Internet Archive. If you’re wondering how that started, the founder Brewster Khale (who I’ve met a few times) is one of those folks like me who played ‘startup roulette. Unlike me, it worked out, he ended up with loads of money — and decided that preserving the Internet was a worthy goal. If you think about it, pretty much everything on the Internet (outside of published journals and historical docs like this Bulletin) are ephemera, keep changing or disappear. If a writer is linking to something on the net, it’s worth looking to see if it’s in the Archive — as it’ll still be there next year…