Word: poisons
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Diving in Austria's Toplitz Lake for counterfeit British currency printed by Nazis in World War II (TIME, Aug. 10), a salvage team came up with a dividend. Their catch: the personal files, diaries and identity cards of Nazi Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, who killed himself (poison) soon after British troops nabbed...
Cause of the disaster, as in similar instances rarely but regularly reported in the U.S., was botulin-a deadly nerve poison secreted by a microbe (Clostridium botulinum), probably from soil. The germs produce botulin only under airless conditions, are hard to kill even by boiling. And since the beets were served cold, Mrs. Gruwell had not boiled them-which might have destroyed the poison...
Though it is the most concentrated poison known (one ounce could, theoretically, kill 100 million people), the botulin did not show its effects until the next day. Then the Gruwells and the four beet-eating Nelsons started to get headaches, feel dizzy, see double. Soon they could not swallow or speak clearly. They were taken to Idaho Falls' Latter-day Saints' Hospital, where their illness was quickly diagnosed. But then the doctors' difficulties began...
...light at night; the bathroom was a hole in one wall. Wooden tables were used as beds, stacked one atop the other like double-decker berths. The man who kept his family thus imprisoned was Rafael Perez Hernandez, 54, husband and father, by profession a purveyor of homemade rat poison...
Curses & Scars. As the children grew up, their view of the outside world-except on extremely rare occasions-was through a hole in the iron door less than an inch in diameter. All day the family worked to help father make poison-from 5 a.m. to dusk. The youngsters got no schooling; their vocabularies were not more than 300 words, and they cursed as a matter of course. Their necks were dotted with small scars where their father had pressed his. knife a bit too hard instilling discipline: no whimpering for more food, no asking...