Word: lithium
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People with high blood pressure, or some diseases of the heart and kidneys, are often forbidden to use salt. Last spring the Foster-Milburn Co. of Buffalo thought it had found something harmless that would give food a salty flavor. The new product, Westsal, contained lithium chloride (table salt is sodium chloride...
Early this month, doctors at a Manhattan hospital suspected that the substitute salt might have played a part in the death of a patient with heart disease. The Food & Drug Administration began experimenting, and found that heavy doses of lithium chloride killed laboratory animals. Then the FDA checked up on human patients taking the salt, found that they were suffering variously from drowsiness, weakness, loss of appetite, nausea, tremors, blurred vision, unconsciousness...
Whether the symptoms were due to the patients' diseases or to the lithium chloride, no one could positively say-at the time. But to play safe, the FDA ordered the Foster-Milburn Co. and two other manufacturers* of similar products to take them off the market...
...Humphry Davy (1778-1829) named it aluminum. British scientists changed it to aluminium to harmonize with sodium, lithium, etc. Britain still uses the extra i, the U.S. drops it. Canada uses both. † The name is said to come from haha, a French word for a boundary to a garden or park. * Davis got his start in Oberlin, Ohio in 1886, peddling kitchenware made of the little-known light metal which his friend Charles Martin Hall had learned to make cheaply. Hall, who died in 1914, left $9,000,000 (one-third of his estate) to Oberlin College, which consequently...
...treatment was developed in experiments on Virgin Islanders by Dr. Harold W. Brown, of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He gave twelve patients daily injections of an antimony compound (lithium antimony thiomalate). In all but one case, the drug destroyed all or nearly all the microfilariae in the blood in less than a month. A recheck four or five months after treatment showed no increase in the worms. Though the drug did not kill all the mother filariae in the glands, Dr. Brown thinks that repeated treatments, killing their offspring, may dispose of the mothers...