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Medicine mystery poison woman Strange case never enlightened
Too young for tachycardia?
Unusual are not the symptoms, but the age. Maureen Welch, who worked in the hospital, said patients were usually old with shortness of breath and an accelerated heartbeat.
Gloria Ramirez and the staff of the clinic suffered from respiratory distress. They poisoned themselves with gas? Gloria is conscious, but she can only answer questions with short sentences.
Nurses faint
Much more unusual, however, is what happens in their environment: Several employees of the clinic, which are in their vicinity, faint. Some are now suffering from shortness of breath and dizziness; six are treated immediately in the hospital.
routine
Doctors and nurses give oxygen and injections for anxiety attacks. Rotuine: Valium, Versed and Ativan should sedate her, Lidocaine and Bretylium regulate the heartbeat. An "ambu-bag", a bubble the size of a football, is said to replace mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a plastic mask that covers Ramirez's mouth and nose.
The revival fails
Ramirez is still getting worse. The employees have to revive them with the Defilbrator. She takes off her T-shirt and presses electrodes to her chest, which are supposed to start the heart with electricity.
Mysterious oil film and ammonia smell
The nurses now see an oil film on the young woman's skin. When they want to lose their blood, it stinks suddenly. Which says it smelled like chemotherapy, or the way blood smells when people use drugs - the smell of ammonia.
What is the syringe continue to Julie Gorchynski and then loses consciousness. Gloria Ramirez dies 50 minutes after the recording.
Crystalline in the blood
Gorchynski sees unknown crystalline particles in the blood, then she faints too. She breathes briefly and hastily, in between exposes her breath completely.
All patients in the emergency department are evacuated.
An infectious disease?
23 out of 37 people fall ill in the emergency room. Most are women. All have the same symptoms: they have shortness of breath, they shiver, and they feel dizzy. Five of those affected stay in the clinic for one night.
Two of those affected, Susan Kane and Sally Balderas, feel a burning pain on their skin.
Necrosis and hepatitis?
Gochynski even has to go to the hospital for two weeks. The diagnosis: hepatitis and an inflamed pancreas. As with the other patients, their breathing is irregular, over many days.
It also suffers from avascular necrosis, in which blood flows into bone tissue, causing it to die. The affected person can hardly move his knees for months.
Sheldon Wagner, a clinical toxicologist at Oregon State University says, "It takes a damn potent poison to do that."
Cancer or kidney failure?
Scientists are autopsying the dead Ramirez under special safety precautions. A clear cause can not be determined: Did the kidneys of the woman fail? Did she die of her cancer? Or heart failure?
mass hysteria?
The blood levels of the employees who fainted turn out to be normal. The Ministry of Health in California therefore explains that they have fallen into mass hysteria - the unconsciousness is therefore psychically conditioned.
Psychic triggers
This is not excluded, because a fainting does not necessarily indicate serious illnesses. The triggers can be harmless: they jump out of bed too quickly in the morning, they are exhausted after physical work; Her body is overheated (this includes fainting during a so-called sunstroke), or she is suffering from negative stress.
Emotional excitement can also lead to unconsciousness: fainting at the sight of the dream man or the dream woman is not an invention of Hollywood directors, and paramedics have relevant experience with teenagers who have a black out at concerts by Tokio Hotel.
An unspecific symptom
However, it is not that easy, because dizziness, shortness of breath and fainting can have many causes: These include disorders of the metabolism as well as anemia, deformities of the ribcage, but also bone diseases. Injuries, such as badly healed rib fractures, can also cause an increased respiratory rate, as well as poisoning or numerous chest discomfort.
Late pregnancy also causes shortness of breath, diphtheria and hives, vocal cord disorders such as lung cancer, pneumonia, chronic bronchitis, tuberculosis or pleurisy. There are funnel chest, diseases of the diaphragm or disorders of the nerves, muscles and skeleton.
The case comes to court
The sufferers are all medical professionals. They know fainting, mass hysteria, and physical reactions to emotional agitation, and none of them was particularly upset when Ramirez came to the clinic.
They worked in the emergency department, and the young woman was just as much a patient to her as a thousand others. The fainted employees sue the clinic.
Chemical reaction?
Another laboratory is investigating the events and putting forward a new hypothesis. The deceased is said to have rubbed with a drug containing dimethylsulforide. This explains both the smell of "garlic", which also has this compound as well as the oil film on the body.
This DMSO had developed into the sulfur compound DMSO2 because the employees gave Ramirez oxygen. The particles in the blood are crystallized particles of the sulfur compound.
Worse, when Ramirez was revived with the Defilbrator, DMSO2 would have turned into DMSO4 gas. But that is poisonous. The sufferers would have inhaled it, and therefore they would have lost consciousness.
Family doubts the thesis
Ramirez's family questions this theory - for a simple reason. Gloria would never have used a gel containing DMSO.
Relatives on their own hire a pathologist to re-examine Gloria. But her body is already decomposed too much after two months.
Conspiracy delusion and conspiracy theory
Now the conspiracy theories are rampant. The clinic and the Ministry of Health want to cover up something?
The rumor is making the rounds, in the clinic there had already been multiple holes from which dangerous gas had flowed. Evidence for this remains.
No toxic gases in the body
The autopsy team in Riverside also discovered nothing of interest in the body of Ramirez, specialists from the Center for Forensic Science in Livermore at San Francisco take over the investigation in early March 1994.
They analyze the blood, tissues, heart, liver, lungs, brain and kidneys of the dead and look for any gas that could have been found traces. They only find nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, normal elements of the air.
anomalies
However, the team's scientific leader, Andresen, encounters anomalies. Below is a derivative of ammonia. Andresen suggests that the patient's organism reacted to the agent tigan and formed the derivative.
In addition, the body contains nicotinamide, a substance that is also typical of drugs such as metaamphetamine. According to Andresen, it is very unusual for the seriously ill to deliberately consume such substances.
The third anomaly is dimethylsulfone in the body. This is also produced industrially, but sometimes the body produces it itself, namely from amino acids containing sulfur.
The liver regulates it, and therefore it exists in the body for less than three days so that healthy people never have measurable amounts of it in their blood. But Ramirez had a high concentration of it in the blood and tissues.
No explanation for the collapse
However, Andresen stresses that dimethylsulfone alone does not explain Ramirez's death or the complaints of emergency room staff.
He says that the patient consumed higher doses of codeine and tylenol, which damage the liver. The ammonia derivative, nicotinamide, and dimethylsulfone showed that something out of the ordinary had happened, but none of it would have resulted in Ramirez's death.
The investigations are concluded with the result that no external action of poisons caused the death.
Investigations of the employees
However, the investigations of the employees persist and bring to light an astonishing spectrum of symptoms.
First of all, women were affected by fainting, muscle spasms, shortness of breath and dizziness. Secondly, those who had not eaten were the primary victims. Doctors who had treated Ramirez and touched her skin had not gotten sick.
The official verdict is now: stress and anxiety attacks as the cause of employee complaints.
Gorchynski's lawyer sounds the alarm
Gorchynski, who finds it worst, uses a lawyer, the doctor Russell Kussman, against the theory of mass hysteria. She demands $ 6 million in compensation.
Which confirms that no one in the emergency room panicked or that there was any sign of mass hysteria. She quietly left the room herself before fainting.
dimethyl
DMSO was used in the 1960s as a remedy for pain and anxiety. But animal testing has shown that it damages the lens and leads to permanent blindness.
However, countless people, including doctors and chemists, continue to use it as an analgesic for injuries, arthritis and muscle disease.
However, if Ramirez took DMSO for pain, which is close to a cancer patient, that does not explain the onset of symptoms among clinic staff.
A dangerous gas
Andresen's director Grant now suggests that dimethyl sulfone would have been formed from DMSO, and then only two oxygen atoms need to be added, and the gas dimethylsulfate is formed.
But this is very dangerous: It kills tissue cells that are exposed to the air, for example in the eyes, mouth and lungs. In the body, it causes convulsions, delirium, paralysis, coma and damage to the kidneys, heart and liver. It can even kill and it is considered a nerve gas for biological warfare.
However, the problem was, according to Grant, that Ramirez's body did not release enough dimethyl sulfone to produce a serious dose of dimethyl sulfate.
How did the poison come to Ramirez??
The researchers design two scenarios of how Ramirez came into contact with DMSO. First, she could rub a cream on her skin containing phencyclidine, known as the drug "Angel Dust." That would also explain the nicotinamide in the blood - it is then an extender. But the drug itself was not found in the body, so this scenario was considered impossible.
In the second scenario, Ramirez rubbed DMSO herself on her body. That would explain the oily film and garlic smell. The oxygen mask on her face would then have resulted in a high dose of dimethylsulfone.
An experiment
The scientists performed an experiment to see how much dimethylsulfone can accumulate in the blood at normal body temperature. They found that the substance forms white crystals at room temperature. That explained the crystalline particles in the blood.
The Possible Consequence: When Susan Kane took blood from the dying Ramirez, the dimethylsulfone crystals would have turned into the dangerous gas.
Criticism of the Gasthese
Other chemists in the US are storming Grants and Andresens explanation. Hans Reich of the University of Wisconsin doubts that dimethyl sulfone could be transformed in the human body.
Colleagues do not see the symptoms of the clinic's employees and have been reported to have dimethyl sulphate poisoning. University of New Mexico's Jack de la Torre even says, "When you're exposed to this gas, first of all, you start crying." No one in the hospital, however, had tears in his eyes.
An unsolved mystery
What is certain is that the Ramirez case shows that bizarre chemical compounds can form in the human body. But what exactly happened to her and the people in the Riverside Clinic remains a mystery 23 years later. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)