Word: thallium
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...have an important engagement. We're going to talk politics. You wouldn't be interested." When he returned late at night, he tossed fitfully, next morning awoke complaining of agonizing stomach pains. With a medical student's precision, he diagnosed his poison as thallium, a paralyzing ingredient in certain rat poisons. Hurried to a hospital and placed in an iron lung, he came out of a coma long enough to murmur "Red Hand," the name of a counterterrorist organization which operates in West Germany and Belgium against suspected arms suppliers to Algerian French Africa. He also muttered...
...product of the Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., founded in 1939 by Richard S. Perkin, a bored Wall Street man whose hobby was amateur astronomy. Teaming up with another amateur astronomer, Charles W. Elmer, he was soon turning out such optical oddities as prisms of poisonous thallium iodide (for infrared work), as well as flame photometers and infra-red spectrometers...
...hardest insect to control is the ant. Manhattan is infested with small red ants; they often nest in buildings instead of in the ground, eat sweets, meat, greasy garbage. The most successful poison against them is thallium sulfate baited with sugar - but all prewar supplies of thallium sulfate came from Germany and France...
...have been three outstanding cosmetic procedures that have been dangerous to the general public: Removal of superfluous hair by X-ray which has resulted in scars and cancer; the use of certain dyes on the eyelashes and eye-brows which has caused blindness and death; and the use of thallium acetate in creams to remove superfluous hairs which has caused serious illness and death...
There is no specific cure for thallium poisoning. But J. C. Munch of Glen Olden, Pa., who last year made a report on the "Pharmacology of Thallium and Its Use in Rodent Control" for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, found pilocarpine helpful. Philocarpine, an active poison from the tropical American jaborandi shrub, stimulates many of the physiological activities which thallium destroys. It causes saliva and urine to flow, hair to grow. Mr. Munch telegraphed instructions to California on how to use the drug, took a plane to administer it himself...