Word: sodium
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...what had they swallowed? Best clue was that Donna had eaten no flounder and had not got sick. Dr. Singley remembered having read in medical school a 1945 report of sodium nitrite poisoning in New York City. A colleague clinched it: he had just reread the same story in Berton Roueché's Eleven Blue Men, reprinted from The New Yorker. Simultaneously, unknown to the Camden team, doctors across the Delaware River were giving methylene blue to women who had eaten flounder in a downtown restaurant...
When Is a Poison? Nobody knows how many of the additives now in use have been fully tested. Best guess: about 150 are tried and true, will cause no problem, e.g., old familiars such as sodium benzoate (preservative in foods and many soft drinks), and other items less recognizable but long widely used-calcium or sodium propionate (mold inhibitor in bread) and butylated hydroxy anisole (antioxidant to keep fats from going rancid). Another 150 are expected to pass the tests, but 100 or more are in a medical no-man's land...
Spontaneous stomach rupture sometimes follows overdosing with sodium bicarbonate, but is uncommon from any cause. A case like Sharry Rubin's is rare indeed...
...their aortas to answer a host of questions about the effect of fats in the diet on the amount of fats (especially cholesterol) in the blood. In one especially tricky procedure he hooked up a baboon's freshly removed aorta with a heart-lung machine and used radioactive sodium acetate to find out how much fat is manufactured in the walls of the aorta itself. With a small branch baboonery at L.S.U., Dr. Holman was tackling related problems. Both hoped to get vital information with a direct bearing on human heart-and-artery disease. The unfriendly dog-faced baboon...
...soon hit $1, using methods that seem useful for the Middle East, where the cheapest desalting costs at least $2 per 1,000 gal. New methods: improved fuel-fired distillation processes, solar evaporation techniques, electrified membranes that draw off salt's sodium and chlorine ions...