Word: livers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...minimum of discomfort and, it seemed, could do them no harm at all. It rapidly became widely used. But last week doctors were disturbed by reports in the New England Journal of Medicine that halothane might have caused as many as ten deaths by damaging the patient's liver...
Halothane (C2HBrCIF3) is chemically kin to chloroform, which has long been accused of causing occasional liver damage. First synthesized in England in 1951, halothane was cautiously tested and carefully evaluated. By the time it was released for U.S. distribution by Ayerst Laboratories under the trade name Fluothane, it had been adjudged harmless in 10,000 human cases...
...England Journal's warning covered reports from three topflight medical centers (Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian, Stanford University and the University of Michigan) of cases in which patients died after otherwise successful operations under halothane. Some autopsies showed the liver to have become a mass of dead tissue. Some patients who survived had liver disease for weeks or months...
Alerted U.S. anesthesiologists are planning to go right on using it, but cautiously. It probably should not be given twice within two or three months to the same patient. Physicians will watch, both before and after an operation, for signs of liver disorder. Stanford's Dr. John Bunker, one of a team reporting two deaths, says that "on the basis of what seems to be an almost infinitesimal number of complications from halothane, I don't think a moratorium on the drug is justifiable now." The Food and Drug Administration, still studying the reports, was inclined to agree...
...suspected cases and all relatives of known victims. It takes only one drop of blood. Anybody with a normal ceruloplasmin level can forget about Wilson's disease. But anybody with an abnormally low level, the Bronx doctors say, should have a further test for copper in the liver. If this registers high, the patient is assumed to have the chemical defect and is promptly put on drugs and diet in the hope of preventing the development of full-blown disease...