Word: ergot
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...doubt this is about the umpteenth letter you will have received concerning the Sept. 10 article on the tragic ergot poisoning incident in France...
...Parasite. Last week the word came back from the police laboratory:"We have identified a vegetable alkaloid having the toxic and biological characteristics of ergot, a cereal parasite." Pont-Saint-Esprit had been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten. Modern medicine knows about ergot, but has rarely seen it in the form of an epidemic disease.* It is a black fungus that grows on wet grain, contains chemicals that powerfully affect the blood vessels and the nervous system. Doctors often use ergot extracts to start...
...Middle Ages, growing uncontrolled in wet summers, ergot was no such helpful friend. The disease was called "St. Anthony's Fire," and raged periodically through Europe. Monastic chroniclers wrote of agonizing burning sensations, of feet and hands blackened like charcoal, of vomiting, convulsions and death. Whole villages were driven mad. That, in effect, was what had happened to Pont-Saint-Esprit...
...week's end, French police had found the miller who ground the ergot-laden rye and a man who acknowledged selling him the grain, charged them both with involuntary homicide. In Pont-Saint-Esprit, the toll of illness passed 200; four had died, 28 were still on the critical list. France considered itself lucky: all the contaminated grain seemed to have gone into that one bag of flour delivered to Baker Roch Briand...
Abortion drugs come in two forms: 1) pills and 2) paste. To get around the law, the pills masquerade as something else (sample label: "An aid to delayed menstruation caused by cold or exposure to inclement weather"). They generally contain ergot, quinine, apiol oil or various exotic substances, none of which, doctors say, can possibly produce abortion. But in the large quantities with which desperate patients often dose themselves, they may be fatal...