Patient Eats Toxic Chemical, Emits Hazardous Gas In Hospital
Absent other information, the referred to ‘rodent poison’ is probably a superwarfarin. It’s like regular people-coumadin, but superconcentrated. It kills rodentia by causing them to bleed to death.
Which makes the ‘gas effect’ seem really odd, but possibly explainable.
A patient who apparently ingested rodent poison and is emitting potentially harmful gasses has created a hazardous material situation at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor.
The man is isolated in his room in the medical intensive care unit on the hospital’s sixth floor, 5301 McAuley at East Huron River Drive, hospital spokeswoman Lauren Jones said this afternoon.
Two thoughts: 1) I sincerely hope this patient recovers, and 2) if this is just upper GI bleed smell someones’ going to have rotten egg smell on their face.
I looked up superwarfarins, found a couple of interesting case reports, but none that talk about abnormal gases.
(For the uninitiated, the smell of digested blood is amazingly awful. It’ll make experienced, hard ED staff retch). I can understand why the smell would set off alarms, except that it’s not that uncommon, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
It’ll be interesting to see what come of this.
Lighting matches in the hospital is a nono, by the way.
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
The pesticide probably was a phosphide (for example aluminum phosphide) like Phostoxin. In contact with water (or body fluids like saliva or stomac fluid) the toxic gas phosphine is produced.
There have been several similar cases worldwide.
it occurs to me that the people at St Joe’s didnt recognize the disgusting odor of the upper gi bleed because they had never experienced it before….when i came through Nursing in the 60’s Upper GI bleeds such as bleeding ulcers and alcoholics with esophageal varacies were pretty common and you could diagnose it when you walked on the ward…the fact that medical staff now a days thought it was a lethal gas is a tip of the hat to the medical progress and those who worked long and hard to achieve it…
i havent read this insight anywhere yet….