dblum | February 1, 2010On Friday, a 41-year-old Missouri woman was charged with poisoning her granddaughter with an anti-clotting medication. The reason: she wanted to scare the one-year-old's parents into uniting over the child's illness and giving up their divorce plans.
The poisoning was discovered when the little girl began bleeding uncontrollably from her mouth and nose. Although doctors treated her successfully, they expressed concern about long-term damage. High exposure to anti-coagulents, usually members of the Warfarin family of drugs, such as Coumadin, has been linked to heart and bone damage.
Bizarre as…
dblum | January 29, 2010In 1854, the essayist Henry David Thoreau published an ode to a morning fire: "Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird... Lark without song, and messenger of dawn." Scientists, of course, saw the hazing blue of wood smoke - or any smoke derived from burning plant material - as something less poetic. In particular, the smoke from dried leaves of the tobacco plant attracted serious attention from chemists by the end of the 19th century.
Victorian scientists had, for instance, calculated that cigarette smoke was about four percent carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas which directly interferes with the…
dblum | January 27, 2010Late last summer, six researchers at Harvard University's medical school fell into a poisoner's trap. Each poured a cup of coffee from a communal coffee maker in the school's pathology department. All of them ended up in the hospital; some had fainted, others were dizzy and nauseated, most couldn't hear over the ringing in their ears.
Investigators quickly discovered that the coffee machine's water tank had been laced with laboratory preservative called sodium azide, used to keep bacteria from growing in chemical solutions. This offered up an almost limitless pool of suspects - anyone…
dblum | January 25, 2010
Speakeasy bar, 1933
I love the cocktails of the 1920s, invented by Prohibition-era mixologists trying to cover up the taste of bathtub gin. The Bee's Knees, which stirs lemon juice and honey in with the liquor; the Sidecar (personal favorite) which blends lemon juice and orange-infused liqueurs like Cointreau with whiskey. At one point I acquired the 1930s Savoy Book of Cocktails thinking to gain even more, um, experience.
I gave it up up though. Those Jazz-Age cocktails are just too potent. During Prohibition (1920-1933), of course, they were even more so because the bootlegged liquors…
dblum | January 13, 2010My new book - The Poisoner's Handbook - will be published next month (February 18). But it's already having this effect on my life: my husband has developed a nervous habit of moving his coffee cup out of my reach. When the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the book (see link below) I promptly received the following e-mail: "Read the wonderful weekend section front in the Journal. But the coffee my wife just handed me tastes a little odd."Â When the invitation was sent out for my book launch party, it read: "We promise that the beer, wine, and snacks will be completely…