Word: puffers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Davis discovered that the active ingredient in the "zombie potion" was a species of puffer, or blowfish. Many of these fish contain a tetrodotoxin, one of the most powerful non-protein poisons known...
...principal ingredients are consistent in three of four localities," he reports in his paper. Several plants containing skin irritants are used, a charred human bone is thrown in just for show, but the active ingredients are a large New World toad (Bufo marinus) and one or more species of puffer fish. The toad, Davis reports, is a "veritable chemical factory," containing hallucinogens, powerful anesthetics and chemicals that affect the heart and nervous system. The fish is more potent still, containing a deadly nerve poison called tetrodotoxin...
...learn how these poisons might relate to zombiism, Davis turned to an unlikely source: Japanese medical literature. Every year a number of Japanese suffer Botanist Davis tetrodotoxin poisoning as a result of eating incorrectly prepared puffer fish, the great delicacy fugu. Davis found that entire Japanese case histories "read like accounts of zombification." Indeed, nearly every symptom reported by Narcisse and his doctors is described, from the initial difficulty breathing to the final paralysis, glassy-eyed stare and yet the retention of mental faculties. In at least two cases, Japanese victims were declared dead but recovered before they could...