On Wednesday an Elvis impersonator was arrested for mailing an envelope with ricin to President Obama. Thankfully the envelope was intercepted before it ever got to its intended victim. Read a nice summary here. Of course there is more to the story. According to the New York Times the suspect had uncovered a plot to sell body parts on the black market.
Ricin, body parts and an Elvis impersonator.
Ricin is not an easy poison to get. It sounds simple. Grow a castor bean plant (Ricinus communis), harvest the beans, get to ricin out, sing "Jail House Rock" and put the ricin in some letters. Fortunately it is not that easy. But "Suspicious Minds" have tried. In February 2008 a man in Las Vegas was admitted to the hospital with respiratory difficulty and eventually lapsed into a coma. It was discovered that he was attempting to process ricin.
Ricin is leftover in the "mash" that results from the production of castor oil from castor beans. It is nearly impossible to get poisoned by eating castor beans. The beans pass whole thought your body and the ricin is not absorbed very well. But once it is absorbed into the body it leads to alterations in protein synthesis. The result is nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and then cardiac and hepatic injury. Thankfully toxicity is treatable.
Its Friday, the end of a difficult week. We have had deaths in Boston, explosions in Texas and winter that will not leave. We can be grateful for a sense of humor and Elvis. Enjoy!
One of my favorite small towns in central Texas is West. It was a perfect distance to drive a girls basketball team for a tournament. It was midway for those trips to Dallas when an emergency ice cream stop needed a Dairy Queen. Or the cherry limeade at the Sonic called your name. There is the kolache bakery where mouth watering delicacies awaited. Every Labor Day weekend was Czech Fest. A celebration of everything great about being Czech and about West.
Yesterday there was a massive explosion and fire at a fertilizer plan in West. Many buildings were leveled. The number of dead or injured will not be known for some time. A horrible situation for a cute little town. Read about the explosion here.
Fires in chemical plants are full of danger. The first concern is the risk of ignition. As in this fire the chemicals used to make fertilizer are highly combustible. It appears the fire was under control when it reignited and exploded. All fires produce carbon monoxide, a gas that prevents your hemoglobin from carrying oxygen. House fires, and chemical fires, also produce cyanide. Cyanide stops your cells from utilizing oxygen and creating energy. In addition nitrogen and sulfur oxides are produced. Those chemicals are irritant gases that burn your eyes and your lungs. Some of those gases can scar your lungs leading to long term damage. Some gases are also heavier than air. They will pool in low lying areas putting additional people at risk.
As you can imagine the situation is West is fraught with danger for everyone. Maybe it is time for all of us that are going about our days hundreds of miles away to say a prayer for everyone that lives in my favorite Texas small town.
Life in toxicology can be equally fascinating and disturbing. Take the patient that I consulted on recently.
This elderly women was diagnosed that morning with cancer. No doubt a rough way to start your day. The horror experienced by the family had to have been considerable. One family member decides to act. She read that apricots kill cancer cells. So she ground up a bunch of apricot seeds and gave them to her mother. Later that evening I get involved when the mother is being treated in a hospital emergency department for headache, confusion and agitation. The patient while fascinating from a tox aspect, is also fascinating from a moral view. What if the daughter decided it was best to give her mother the apricots to ease her pain and end her life. It is also well know that apricot seeds are poison.
Under normal circumstances there is no risk of cyanide poisoning from accidentally eating an apricot pit. The small amount of cyanide is bound within a hard shell. Normally the seed or pit passes through you intact. But what happens when it is ground up in a blender? The safety capsule God put around the poison is now gone. The cyanide, through still in small quantities, becomes available. So how about if you you grind up a bunch of pits in a blender? The potential to become ill becomes much higher.
The initial signs of cyanide toxicity are confusion, agitation, headache, nausea and vomiting. Cyanide prevents your cells from utilizing oxygen and producing energy. The tissues that need oxygen to work, your brain and heart, eventually stop. Thankfully there is a treatment. Sometimes when there is a small exposure to cyanide just giving fluids and oxygen does the trick. For the majority of patients a more invasive antidote is given. The antidote, hydroxocobalamine, binds the cyanide you have in your body then you can get rid of it.
Apricots as a cancer treatment. Is it the cure we have all been waiting for? Unfortunately the data tells us no. Can it cause bad adverse effects, even death? Unfortunately, yes. Thankfully, our patient had a good outcome.
Over the last two Weeks I have been a little short on tox blog posts. But this week one news item jolted me back. "MTV star dies of carbon monoxide poisoning". The death was carried by multiple news outlets including this piece on the Today show. It seems that "Buckwild" star Shain Gandee, his uncle and a friend decided to do a little mudding. As one who lived in rural central Texas; that sounds like a normal Saturday to me. Unfortunately they got stuck in mud that covered a part of the truck. Like all of us I suspect they ran the car in order to stay warm until someone showed up to pull them out. But the mud covered and plugged the tail pipe.
Carbon monoxide is a result of incomplete combustion of any fuel with carbon in it, including gasoline. Carbon monoxide is a insidious killer. It starves your vital organs of oxygen by altering the hemoglobin in your blood. First you get get a little giddy and sleepy, then slowly go downhill until your heart stops. With the tailpipe clogged there was no place for the exhaust to go. So the carbon monoxide filled the truck.
So carbon monoxide is everywhere. Even in Ford Bronchos in the hills West Virginia. Carbon monoxide knows no favorites. Even reality TV stars.
