DMSO is actually a really crazy chemical. It will carry chemicals dissolved in it into the blood stream. I worked for a guy that worked as a pathologist for the New York CSI during the 50’s. He told a story about a girl that was murdered by her boyfriend. He had painted the steering wheel of her car with DMSO that he had dissolved snake venom into. To this day, that’s the craziest chemistry story I’ve ever heard.
@@jazzfeline5970 he did. She had no puncture wounds at all. Just a slight rash on her hands. Since she tested positive for snake venom, they knew it had to be injected and not swallowed, so they checked the body again and found nothing. The detectives found out that the boyfriend worked at the New York Zoo as a snake handler. If not for that direct tie, they wouldn't have ever known. He milked a snake for months, so it was definitely first degree.
Two interesting things about DMSO, which is a commonly used solvent in organic chemistry: it’s a very effective topical anesthetic. It also is easily absorbed by the skin into the bloodstream, often taking its solute with it. Which leads me to this true, but slightly embarrassing story that occurred during my undergraduate days as a chemistry major. I was working in the chem lab on an organic synthesis project and (here’s the embarrassing part) I was not wearing gloves. I did not realize that one of my fingers made contact with a test tube containing bromine dissolved in DMSO. Bromine is very caustic and it really burns if you were to spill some on your skin…..unless said skin is numb because it’s been treated with a topical anesthetic like, say, DMSO. In which case, the bromine can painlessly penetrate and burn its way through the skin. In, my case, to the bone. When I glanced down at my hand, I noticed it was orange-tinged by the bromine. I also couldn’t help notice that I was staring at one of my finger bones, exposed through a sizable chemical burn. I wasn’t shocked or grossed out. Rather, I had three simultaneous thoughts: 1) I’m gonna get in trouble for not wearing gloves; 2) Pretty cool that this does not hurt at all; 3) I probably should go to the hospital. Fortunately, the University’s chemistry lab was directly across the street from the medical school and hospital, where my father just happened to be an attending surgeon. I strolled into his office, finger raised, saying, "Hi Dad, I think I should get this treated." He went white as a ghost (no, not from any toxic gas emissions), grabbed me by the finger and dragged me to the ED to have my wound attended to. They did a great job; I still have all of my fingers and no scar! Good times!
wowww, that's absolutely astounding and kind of amazing that you didn't feel any pain. my first thought was because DMSO is a topical anesthetic, once the skin was burnt past the dermis or so you would feel pain, but then I figured that the DMSO is so readily absorbed into the skin that it basically was carried all the way down to the bone as the bromide burned your tissue. not a chemistry major so that might not be the proper explanation, but wow. that's a really fascinating story, and of course I'm really glad that you ended up being okay.
Can you imagine the terror your father had? Lol Your child comes into your office and says “hey, I think this is a bad thing” and they’re missing part of their finger
While I was an undergraduate, a graduate student was doing an organic chemistry synthesis. He dissolved cyanide in DMSO. But he dropped the flask containing the solution, and when the flask shattered, he was splashed with the cyanide -- which immediately entered his blood. He nearly died, but because the doctors knew what the poison was, he survived.
My friend's brother, Wolfgang, was a 4th year chemistry student and was doing an experiment during a class, following a written set of instructions. At a certain point in the experiment, the expected result of a certain action didn't match what the instructions said: the new substance was the wrong colour. Wolfgang took the test tube up to the professor teaching the class to ask what had gone wrong. The professor only had a brief glimpse of the substance before it literally blew up in his face. Wolfgang had made nitroglycerine! Fortunately, neither the professor nor anyone else was seriously hurt, although Wolfgang's normally brown hair turned a strange shade of reddish brown until it grew out.
@@hughmungus1767 -- OMG They were both lucky to have survived. Here on TH-cam, a guy treated glycine (an amino acid) with nitrous acid. He was surprised by a bright blue product ... that tended to explode (sodium dinitrosomethanide).
About the "woman were more effected, as were those who skipped dinner"--this supports the DSMO theory as well. The ones likely handling the vial of blood affected by the vacuum were probably mostly nurses (primarily female at the time), and anyone who skipped a meal is going to be more heavily affected by a potential drug in the air.
I'm a chemist who works with DMSO, and the hazard that we worry about is it's ability to carry other chemicals with it into the bloodstream. This means that another chemical (a topical medicine, or makeup or an accidental spill) could have been transported into her bloodstream by DMSO.
That's what I was thinking to begin with. I'm glad he talked about DMSO which is what I suspected, but he didn't say it was a carrier chemical. In fact the reason it was banned in the 1970's was precisely because it carried chemicals through the skin. (There was an episode of _Quincy_ on this). I think low were using it to deliver illicit drugs inside themselves.
I don't think that she was exposed so anything that could have led to such a outcome when she went through chemotherapy and suffered badly from cancer. But what do you think about the suggested solution in the video and about the open questions?
@@Nitidus Anything in the atmosphere that she came into contact with could have been absorbed into her skin. Also her chemotherapy could have been pulled out of her skin and went through the gloves of the ER staff.
RIP Gloria. I really liked that he reminded the viewers that ultimately this was a human being that was suffering tremendously and who know what agonizing hell her final hours were like.
@@polocatfan You didn't watch the video did you? This lady had cancer and its speculated she applied DMSO to her skin for pain relief, DMSO is fairly innocuous but due to a series of events that happened after she was uncoscious and dying (such as being administered oxygen, the heat from the defibrillator and the sudden low pressure of the blood draw container) turned the DMSO into another toxic chemical. How exactly does this mean she "literally" commited a crime against humanity?
You stated this perfectly. She was a human suffering from cancer and had no intention of hurting anyone. My heart goes out to her family that must have been not only upset that she died but other people were hurt accidentally as well.
I watched this in real time. The hazmat guys were there when I went to bed. In the morning people were so uncomfortable about it the news agencies started to sweep it under the rug. Over the last quarter century it almost became urban legend. Thanks for covering the facts, the unknown, and doing it respectfully. Curious if women, generally, having more fat and less muscle, compared to men, absorbed more during the incident.
That's an astute point with the fatty/muscle tissue ratio, great observation! For those interested: It's well known that many drugs (and I guess biologically active chemicals in general) *_may_* affect women somewhat differently in equal doses compared to men because of this (women having a higher fat percentage than men), as it means that water-soluble drugs will be more dilute in the "average" male's bloodstream. Additionally, the often significant differences in total body mass also affect this. Meanwhile, with drugs/chemicals soluble in fatty tissues the effect can be reversed, although I believe it's a bit more complicated in that regard as things soluble in fats tends to accumulate in it and stay in the body for much longer (which is why blood tests can determine if you smoked weed for such a long time afterwards).
There's the additional issue many of the standards for drug testing and progression are primarily performed on men and that causes significant issues with accurate information about how drugs affect women.
I remember hearing about this in the 90s. As I recall, the article stated she'd been receiving medication mixed with DMSO as a transdermal vehicle. We used to use it all the time to get meds into horses just by rubbing it on their skin. You wear rubber gloves but it still goes through them and you taste garlic pretty fast.
When I studied chemistry, we were always told to be careful with DMSO for that reason. It's not toxic itself, but makes your skin permeable for other chemicals.
That’s super interesting and thank you! Do you happen to remember what kinds of meds needed a transdermal vehicle? Have these drugs been updated to a better or different vehicle? I’m racking my brains but the only transdermal I can think of right now is the patch. There must be, or was at one time, others…?
@@MartijnterHaar Yeah, I came here to look for this exact comment. Just like you said, DMSO itself is not particularly harmful, but it's a fantastic solvent any anything dissolved in it will carry right through the skin. Thus in the lab we are very careful around DMSO.
Just a little note, women can be just as sexist toward women as men. I had female boss once, and I was the only woman on staff. She paid me the least and was constantly making disparaging remarks to and about me. It was so bad it made my male coworkers uncomfortable. I've seen other incidents but that was the most egregious. I always enjoy your videos. Thank you!!
Jeez, you'd think she had a little more compassion for a fellow woman in the workplace. Then again, I've also seen the opposite in the reverse situation. People can be such assholes.
Yeah that stuff is crazy to see for me as a guy. I don’t understand what the thought process is for them. I feel like it almost shows a lack of confidence in your identity as a woman or something. Like, they equate certain qualities that they don’t have with feminity, and so they try to assert their identity as females by acting fkn prudish. Like the female equivalent of an incel or a white knight.
About women being more affected by what happened, I remember hearing a while ago that you shouldn't wear makeup to protests because it can make the effects of tear gas worse. Maybe something like that could also explain why women seemed to be more negatively affected if this were a gas/vapor, if it were sticking to the foundation, moisturizer, etc on their skin maybe they'd experience effects like burning skin more strongly than men would?
@@beebs4283 considering this happened in the early 90s the different chemicals in makeup at the time could very possibly have contributed to it. I don't really know any makeup history and ingredients beyond early victorian, edwardian, and the radium girls so its pure speculation on my part.
My mom has a toenail fungus, one day she put DMSO on it with a little silicone toe cover. It began to hurt so she took it off. She was shocked to see her toe had shriveled into a raisin. It took a couple weeks to go back to normal. Didn’t get rid of the fungus.
I remember this case. When they came out and said it was mass psychosis I said BS. Too many observations indicated something chemical had happened to affect the professionals in that room.
Agreed. Imagine, losing actual bone density and concluding the cause was all in your head! That's what i call being deliberately obtuse (or just plain corrupt) Hope that nurse won her court case.
the whole idea of mass psychosis is ridiculous. The individual affliction suddenly spreads through a group by...suggestion? Telepathy? There is no idea what mechanism is involved, so it's like you're being asked to believe in magic.
@@christinemccrea4371 Mass psychogenic illness (not psychosis) is unfortunately a real thing and people obviously aren't asked to believe anything. You see someone else's symptoms and "copy" them. A recent case was with a youtube channel from someone with tourette's going viral and a significant uptick in young people looking for help with sudden onset tourette's like symptoms.
As a chemist I've used lots of DMSO. Everyone hated using it. It used to be used in medical patches to administer medicine through the skin. So care needs to be taken when handling it because the DMSO will transport it through the skin. I understand that Gloria was in advanced stages of cervical cancer and probably using a lot of the DMSO cream, hence the oily sheen on her body. DMSO does smell a bit garlicy but the lower purity DMSO smells like garbage. It induces the gagging reflex due to the impurities of diethyl sulfide and dimethyl sulfide. If you get DMSO on your skin, you can taste it, and it is absolutely disgusting, like someone emptied a garbage can in your mouth. Sadly, I think a simpler explanation can be concluded. She used lots of lower purity DMSO cream and these impurities built up due to her condition. When one or more hospital staff touched her skin they absorbed some of the DMSO and impurities and reacted they way they did. DMSO is a white solid below 18C which would appear as a yellow solid when they drew blood and it cooled.
The video says her family denied that she had ever used it. Though, my first thought at that point was that maybe she didn't know she was using it, because it was under a different name or something.
@@SurvivalSquirrel Good question. The gloves they wore back then were latex. Offers protection against bacteria or virus' but doesnt offer protection against industrial solvents. In about 2001 chemical labs had moved to using nitrile gloves (usually purple, green or blue) which offer much better protection against a wider range of chemicals. If they'd used nitrile gloves, this wouldnt have happened. Manufacturers publish charts of breakthrough times for gloves. Hope this helps.
@@renakunisaki This is most likely-even to the point that perhaps a fellow patient/friend gave her some in an unmarked container from a larger one. Perhaps as you said the bottle was labeled differently. We all know people who kept medications from ten or twenty years ago to the point they may have been labeled differently. There's always a grandma out there with Vaseline from 1978. The possibilities are endless.
I agree, I’m an immunologist & we use DMSO to dissolve drugs for cell culture treatment. I’ve always been so wary of using DMSO because of the health risks. (And shockingly, DMSO can be purchased by anyone from Amazon!)
We used to use DMSO on our horses as a topical treatment for strains, etc. My best show horse (Arabian) was prone to laminitis (a very painful hoof condition) and one vet gave DMSO in an IV to see if it would help. The horse smelled like a giant clove of garlic until it worked it's way out of his system.
@@bevinboulder5039 it doesn't show a Google translate button underneath the comment for you? It does on my tablet but I'm not sure how as I know nothing about tech.
Yeah, I don’t put much stock in her family’s rejection of the DMSO theory. Seems like they just don’t want to acknowledge that this could have been her fault in any way. (Which is dumb. How could she possibly have foreseen this outcome? She did nothing wrong, even if her actions led to this.)
@@asparagusstaging430 Did you watch the video? It has evidentiary support. Learn what ‘speculation’ means. Also, yeah. I do think they’re being dumb. That’s the whole point of my comment. Grieving people can be very, very dumb. Strong emotion does that to people.
After refreshing my memory with the Wikipedia article, I now recall that DMSO was used as an alternative (unproven) cancer treatment. (It's currently available on the internet.) Gloria Ramirez, who had cervical cancer, may have used it for that purpose. And the family might have denied it.
@@norman_5623 This is a good point, and if there was insurance or lawsuits involved, they wouldn't have wanted to admit that her own actions led to that outcome, accidental or not.
My memory from the early 1980s is that DMSO was considered an amazing universal solvent - notable for its ability to penetrate human flesh in a way that was unparalleled. One of the symptoms of DMSO exposure was anyone so exposed would have garlic breath - yup, a drop on your hand could give you garlic breath. It was seen as potentially offering a method of dispersing medicine without the need for an injection. This was a big enough deal that I recall a Time Magazine cover feature on it - and, in typical journalist fashion, it made DMSO sound wonderful as well as potentially toxic. It is entirely plausible that the toxic patient could have used it since it was rumored to treat cancer as well as mitigate pain. She would not have needed to rub it all over herself - given its propensity to disperse widely from a single location.
This story has always fascinated me. I do recall from other research that the DMSO theory also took into consideration that she was "shocked" with a defibrillator, which could have superheated her body for a brief period of time, possibly causing chemicals to be aerosolized briefly. Unbelievably interesting story, regardless.
No need for that crazy theory, the creator of the video clearly isn't a chemist. C2H6O4S would be volatile at normal body temperature in high enough concentration, this is likely why the patient died only 30 minutes after admission. Edit: Furthermore the DMSO can act as a carrier and even particulate that landed on exposed skin could be absorbed.
@@Fresh_Biscuits Don't worry I'm not a chemist and won't release any videos claiming knowledge of chemistry I don't have. But I will call out a dumbass who is knowingly or out of sheer incompetence spreading misinformation. Sincerely, smell my farts
All my life, doctors have told patients it was in their heads way too often. Many people suffer for years before proving they have something with a new test. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for example, now called post viral syndrome, was treated as psycho psomatic for decades before being proved to be a real testable thing.
Post Vital Fatigue or Post Viral Syndrome is the precursor to CFS (now knows as myalgic encephalomyelitis) if you have PVF for a period of more than (I think it’s 6 months now?) it’s then diagnosed as CFS/ME, though many developed it from something other than PVF. I’ve been diagnosed with CFS/ME for about 16yrs now, and as far as I know there’s no actual test for it, just ruling out everything else? Then again it’s only considered a real thing by like 50% of the medical population here in Australia so I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve missed out on some sudden breakthrough 🙄
I've had chronic fatigue my whole life (I have ehlers danlos fibromyalgia and a million comorbids) I didn't find any help until I got put on stimulants for ADHD.
I go into anaphylactic shock. Went to an allergy specialist eventually to try and learn more. He told me I was just having panic attacks. I suggested I eat an orange in his office (that's my nemesis) and he could watch the results, but he wasn't interested. Never been diagnosed with panic attack before or since. Another lazy doctor. Yeah, I'm 70 and I've become a tad cynical.
I had neck pain and dizziness symptoms for over a year. No one found anything and told me it was all my imagination. Finally found out I had a fractured C1 C2 vertebra.
How well I know this how it was with CFS. I have Fibromyalgia. Well, now thousands perhaps millions more people are right here with me and with Long Covid Syndrome. But, I found something of use for some of us at least. A neurological Doctor in England found the compression of our midsection and legs will keep the blood in our upper body longer and give us more energy and stamina. I wear compression of the midsection with attached back brace, no leg compression and it works for me. Good luck all you CFS, Fibromyalgia, Long Term Covids out there may you find good compression.....ha, ha, and may the force be with you...
I remember this story being covered on Buzzfeed unsolved. Someone in the comments seemed to have solved it, saying that one of the treatments for cervical cancer at that time would've caused the reaction that emitted the poison and would explain everything. I can no longer find the comment otherwise I'd credit the person and get more details.
DMSO (Dimethyl Sulfoxide) would explain the garlic scent. One interesting thing about it is, while not toxic on its own, it can very easily ferry compounds that would normally be blocked by the skin through the skin. Depending on the type of gloves they were using, it could have gone through those too
@@samarnadra As far as I can gather, most Latex gloves do not provide adequate protection against DMSO. So I suppose it’s possible that they absorbed bad stuff through their gloves and skin
@@flightlesschicken7769 Correct. The MSDS for DMSO now states to use non-latex gloves when handling. Latex, while protective is still porous enough for DMSO to pass through and as it passes through, it will pickup any crud along the way, so silicon oil used to keep the gloves from sticking to the forms and the talc used inside the gloves. DMSO was once used as a component of certain types of chemical triggers, until it was discovered the crud literally could go through most natural products like latex, rubber and ceramics.
So true. Common things that people don't think of also, like wood panels or anything plastic made from abs . First time I used dmso on my hand ( dupytrens contracture) with vitamin e, about 5 mins after absorption I was peeling agrapefruit watching something and I actually bit my lip chewing on a non existent peice of grapefruit cause I could taste it just through hand contact .
Speaking of phosgene, I vaguely recall an incident at an indoor swimming pool in England where a number of smokers attending the pool wound up generating it in their lungs from the chlorine in the air mixed with chemicals from their smoking in their lungs, or something to that effect. They basically got gassed by going to the pool.
Just because her family hadn't heard of DMSO it doesn't mean she wasn't using it. She would have been buying it from some shady person because in the 90's you couldn't buy DMSO in stores or anything. I know this because I used to work for a vet that used it in his clinic, he had to get his from Mexico, he vacationed there every year and bought a number of supplies down there for use in his clinic. I don't know anything else that would give her skin the oily appearance and garlic smell. That sounds like classic DMSO (I used to accidentally get it on myself all the time, the oily thing is caused by your own oil glands and the smell doesn't go away for days). The thing I'm not buying here is the nerve agent. If the proposed nerve agent acts more like tear gas, what other nerve agent could have been created? Was there something in her body along with the DMSO that interacted with everything else? I think like many things in life we will never know the exact nerve agent. The fact that one person ended up with bone disease is weird, did she have some hidden genetic thing going on that triggered by the nerve agent? Why was she the only one that it happened to? What a weird situation!!
It's already been pointed out by others, but DMSO is actually often used as a solvent, both in chemical laboratories as a general-purpose solvent and by veterinarians to administer drugs to horses (and maybe other animals, idk) because it lets them apply the drug, mixed with/dissolved in DMSO, to the skin as an ointment of sorts, and the DMSO then transports it through the skin and into the body. In other words: the DMSO could've been used to ferry other, nastier things into that poor woman's bloodstream. Although it's well worth remembering that no other things were actually found in the toxicological analyses.
@@mnxs Yeah I used to be a vet tech. In the early 90's our clinic had a hard time sourcing DMSO so our vet would pick it up in Mexico. Nasty stuff, he always warned us to make sure we washed our hands/forearms before using it because it would carry whatever is on your skin into your bloodstream. Very dangerous stuff.
@@mnxs it's also worth remembering that there was a period of time between sample draw and analysis. Some materials will break down over time and you may not find them, especially using mid 90s technology.
Thank you so much for covering this woman’s death. I have read about it a long time ago, and this is the best explanation of what happened to her and the people who tried to save her that night.
Okay Joe - want to hear something amazing? In February, 1994 I was a 4th year medical student who did a rotation with California Poison Control at San Francisco General Hospital. I was there when this call came in from that emergency room and it was our main topic of discussion for the rest of my elective! Nice overview, by the way. Though a good bit of that is stuff that happened after I moved on from my elective. I did get interviewed, though, and asked to give a brief summary of the case at a toxicology conference a couple months after. I can add that we speculated on the DMSO pretty early on - it is still widely used as a carrier to bring medications thru the skin; it is absorbed so quickly that it drags other molecules (drugs) that normally don't get thru the skin so well with it. We were suspicious with this oily sheen pretty quickly - we thought topical or home remidies about this also. And she also had a Hickman or Mediport (a large IV which goes into a large vein near the heart - common for chemotherapy patients). The thing we were hung up on, though, was the "knock out" power of whatever happened. And, by the way, at the time the report we had was that people did not start passing out until the patient vomited into a basin - we thought there could be something in her stomach contents with knock-out potential, and there just are not that many chemicals which will make people collapse in just seconds. Not even this Dimethyl Sulfate nerve gas, as you mentioned, which, by the way, was not at all on our radar. One such group of knock-out chemicals are a class called "Azides." They are very active nitrogen compounds, which makes them very useful - most notably: in air bags. A spark sets off some azide powder stored in the air bag and it decomposes explosively into mostly nitrogen gas which inflates the air bag. And this lady had a family member who worked in a factory which made air bags for car manufacturers. We were wondering if it was possible she ingested some of this powder. It is very poisonous; it brought up many questions about a possible suicide attempt. But we were the Poison Control Center - it was our job to think about stuff like that. And there were other theories at the time. Her acetylcholinesterase blood activity levels were undetectable - which is related to how pesticides (and she did have a garden shed, though I don't recall if she was actually a gardner) and nerve gas work - by inactivating cholinesterase. I remember we recommended that her Hickman should be particularly evaluated to see if there was any trace of chemicals which were injected into it, but I was already off service by then and I don't know what came of it. Fun (if tragic) little trip down memory lane!
I am with you on home remedies. I was living one town over when this happened and every Latino family I knew lived on 'home remedies' for EVERY ailment.
A similar incident happened here in Pittsburgh back around that same time. A patient was brought in that sickened the E.R. doctor and and nurses. They suggested that it was because he had been using insecticides at home. I think I heard that the doctor died. The story dropped from the news cycle and was never covered again making me wonder what really happened.
@@atomicskull6405 “Swept under the rug” isn’t quite the right term, because what stops them from being reported on more is mostly HIPAA and media laziness. Once the initial shock is gone, it’s very difficult to legally report on specific medical cases because of patient confidentiality laws.
@@ZeteticPhilosopher HIPPA didn't go into effect until 1996. Usually rare cases like this show up as case studies without any identifying patient information after a while. For these cases to just kind of disappear is odd.
@@ThatGirlJD Which is why you can get information on this case which is not available for most others. And yes, rare cases do show up as case studies, but these are not obviously associated with news sources, and are too dense for the average person to read through. Nothing has disappeared.
This is one of those Unsolved Mysteries I remember as a kid and always knew there was some scientific explanation but just couldn’t even begin to think of where it might start. This was a really fascinating episode that ebbed a long, long-standing mystery from my childhood. Bravo and thank you!
I love your mystery videos, I always come away from them feeling like I got a satisfactory explanation from it. You make sure to cover details that other channels don't and round things off with theories or answers that make me think it's pretty much been solved. I'd love more of these kinds of videos, where you take a scientific and level headed approach into other unexplainable events in history.
Everything past the the moment where he pulled the "vapour point" out of his * is nonsense. There is no such thing . There is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature. I have not the slightest idea where did he take 148 celsius from. And the "explanation" that using vacuumed vials made it evaporate? Joe are you kidding me? You do realize that they are hermetically sealed with one way valve? The vapor pressure of DMS is 65 Pa and is sufficiently large to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C. Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K) Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes) Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
SaintPhoeniix, I like Joe's content and his tone of voice, but most of the toxic chemical should be in the vials and not floating around the entire emergency ward. I'm not an expert in anything, other than a stupid know-it-all in TH-cam comment sections, but I don't think that enough could escape from the vials, especially, when they are sealed enough after disconnecting them. I get standard tests every year, and I see that they seem to be covered with a rubbery top, which seals when the entire vial is disconnected. The toxic chemical would have to build up so much that there would be enough to crystallize and some gas would push out of the elasticized hole.
@@eugenetswong exactly. Nothing would leak from the vials. Moreover, Joe made up the fact that they used vacutainers. Although they were invented in 1949, the plastic version was only created in early 90s. Ramirez's case happened in 1994 which makes it unlikely that they already have switched to vacutainers in that hospital. Besides, Joe points out that nurse said the blood had strange smell. She would've smelled nothing if vacutainers were used. Besides, even if they would just pour her blood on the floor it would have to contain not just *_some_* DMS but rather large amount - more then 10% I would guess. Which is simply impossible. DMS vapors (if it was indeed DMS) probably came from her body. With breath, sweat and direct diffusion out of blood vessels through the skin.
@@artiomvas I'm glad that you mentioned the dates. After I submitted my reply, I wondered about that technology and time period. Also, even if they opened her up and scooped her blood by the cup, it would still not explain why she didn't suffer the same symptoms. With a lot of gases affecting the lungs, that happens there, because that is where a lot of moisture is...*I think*. I'm fortunate enough to know that I don't know what I'm talking about, but my point is that her blood should have had big symptoms, I'd think. It almost makes me wonder if she was completely unrelated, and it turned out to be a sewage problem, where a sink p-trap [or whatever it's called] let in sewage gas. Or maybe there was back flow in the ventilation. I could imagine hospital admin not wanting to invite an investigation on their own mistakes. It reminds me of college, when a foreign smell was in a washroom. Nobody recognized it, and if I recall correctly, I sniffed around until I smelled the strongest source from a drain on the floor. I used 2 hands to take water and pour it in there. It might have been somebody else's idea, though. Do you know if toxic odors could come out of a dry drain and cause the symptoms in the video? By the way, thanks for discussing this. I hate how comment sections seem to be almost only fans saying nice things about the content creator, instead of talking about the topic.
DMSO gets used frequently (not that I agree) as a bladder instillation for patients with diagnoses such as Painful Bladder Syndrome or Interstitial Cystitis. And yeah, on those days the whole surgery center smells like a garlic chopping factory. No poisonings or worse yet. I'll make sure the nursing staff don't allow for any vacuum formation in anyone's bladder.
It is DMSO in topical snake-oil ointments which is particularly dangerous. Folks getting poisoned by absorbing the dyes from their clothes and all sorts of craziness PS: I'm 2 min into the video and jumped to the comments to say DMSO ;)
Used DMSO in some of my biology experiments as a graduate student. Yes it has a garlicky smell and penetrates your skin very quickly and you will smell that garlicky odour in your nose.
Hope to goodness that urine samples aren't collected via cystocentesis ...it would cause a temporary vacuum in the bladder. I am joking...the vacuums created by a syringe are 2 or 3 ml at most .. and exist for a minute. TOPS... This theory is swine cleanser (hog wash).
If one of the family members recommended the DMSO or was involved in the use of it, of course they would deny any knowledge of it. They would probably be full of fear and guilt.
It's also entirely possible that she used it and had also never heard of it. If she were pursuing alternative treatments, it's possible someone gave it to her or sold it to her without being explicit about what was in it.
@@ascorbicpng none of what you just said made any sense to me, I'm sorry sometimes certain phrasing confuses me. I'm just not sure how you can speak for another person and attach different meaning to the words they used. She was sick, and it caused harm to people trying to treat her. We don't call radioactive patients toxic. I don't disagree with the fact that she was a health hazard, but it is completely unnecessary to reduce her down to a "Toxic Woman." That's all she's remembered as, and it's sad. I think you both missed the point.
I remember seeing this on live news when I was a kid. The press immediately started covering it up and by the next day there were no more updates, people talked about it for weeks. I've thought about it for years and even wondered if I dreamed the whole thing. Thanks for this video!
@@WaitingForTheSubway I have no idea! I just remember watching the news the following days and there was the "mass hysteria" explanation and then nothing. I suspect they just didn't know and wanted to prevent the spread of "hysteria."
Back in the 70's my dad used to use DMSO because he had chronic terrible pain. He had post-polio syndrome. He had to inject it. It definitely has a fruity garlic smell, quite strong and kind of nauseating. When you said it smelled like that, I knew it had to be DMSO.
The one point that sticks out to me is the family denying she was using DMSO cream. I wish there were more resources or interviews with the family for why they think she was not using it. Her using the cream makes sense and it's not a slight against her for using a remedy like this.
The thing is that unless they lived with her at that time, there doesn’t seem like there’d be a certainty of what she was using. I doubt, even living with my parents still, if I could name the different lotion they might use for a set of dry hands in the winter. They would know better than anyone, but even those who could know best may not.
@@drakesmith471 Some other comments suggested the possibility that she received it unmarked from someone (another patient perhaps) or that it was labeled differently. For example I take a drug called Montelukast Sodium which most people haven't heard of, except that they probably have under it's brand name Singulair (asthma medication). I also take Cetirizine Hydrochloride aka Zyrtec (allergy medication). There's plenty of over the counter example as well like Paracetamol aka Tylenol or Ibuprofen aka Advil (and others).
I remember when this story was reported! it seemed to be straight out of the X-Files!!! I think Chris Carter the creator of the X-Files later used the concept of "toxic" blood in the series. The dismissal of verifiable physical symptoms as "mass hysteria" is also straight out of the Men in Black playbook.
Great closing statements. Glad you recognized her as a human being and not just as a side show. Awesome video as always! Love when you drop new content.
I heard about this when it happened. I was in high school, and I was always curious about it. I had heard the 'mass delusion' explanation, and figured it was just that, but it did seem odd that such a thing would happen in a hospital of all places. I know mass delusion is something people are prone to, especially in stressful circumstances.... but of this specific kind just seemed very odd. They're treated thousands of people just like Ms. Ramirez and for them to imagine something that would cause a response unlike anything else they have ever experienced just seems weird. If they had believed she was infected with meningitis or some other scary contagious disease, sure, but there's really no such thing as "knock out gas" and they would know that.
Also, everyone seems to forget that experienced ER staff have coping strategies in place due to the stuff they deal with on a daily basis they're not going to smell something odd on someone and then make up being sick to the point of convulsions and hospitalizations. They may feel nausea and experience vomiting if it's bad enough and need to get some fresh air, but that will most likely be it.
The Russians have a knockout gas called Kolokol-1. They used it to anesthetize an entire theater full of people that had been captured by Chechen militants. Unfortunately the antidote was not administered quickly enough to some of them.
I know one of the biggest detractors of this theory is that her family said she’d never even heard of DMSO nor used it. But what are the chances a friend suggested it and she decided to try it out of desperation from pains? I don’t think it’s an impossible theory just because her family said, or rather, didn’t know if she had known about it or not.
Except her family would have found out because they undoubtedly had to clean out her house and would have found it. I believe them over this guy at Livermore who never even examined her.
@@testacals Except this theory hinges on her having taken it in topical rather than pill form to account for the greasy substance on her skin. DMSO is sold OTT in a vaseline-like gel. You wouldn't likely take it out out of a labeled container and put it into an unlabeled one.
@@Libbathegreatno, but you could package and sell it in unmarked containers to begin with, if shes purchasing it under the table already, then what do some ignored regulations matter?
You are the first person who has covered this who actually explained the logic behind the most probable theory. Could’ve just been the people I watched before, but they were like 🤷♀️
The concerned humanity and sympatheic fellow-feeling that Joe exhibits in these videos... speaks well of his good character. Keep doing what you're doing, Joe. 'Preciate it.
I've watched probably every single video made about this case. I've seen the DMSO suggestion before, but this was the clearest explanation so far! As an RN,the case was especially fascinating to me, because I could not come up with any scenario which made sense, or didn't beggar the imagination. That report made up by the two women was absolute garbage. ER staff aren't going to faint and/or seizure becase of a smell. Or anything else.
I was working there that night. I knew basically everyone in that ER, And you're right. They were not the types to faint or have "mass hysteria" or anything like that.
@@ericf7063 that would require there to be a type of person to fall victim to psychological disorders. The strongest women you know can end up in an abusive relationship unable to leave. The best nurses can become burn out and develop GAD as a secondary consequence etc. And it got nothing to do with how ‚strong‘ or capable you are. Mental disorders aren’t your fault. And acting like someone is somehow weak for being afflicted by one… is unbecoming of the profession.
I am of the belief that there was a noxious gas leak (such as CO2) in that hospital and they merely swept it under the rug. The DMSO theory is brilliant but just seems exceedingly far-fetched.
im glad I got to watch this! I watched the buzzfeed unsolved video about this and I thought the mass hysteria explanation was total bs too. like these were experienced doctors and trauma nurses and there wasn't anything remotely gross or that disturbing initially about Gloria's case. thank you for breaking down the science!
I have little knowledge on pharmacology but i do know mustard gas derivatives are used sometimes in chemotherapy. It may be possible a combination of several different medications and chemicals (and poor oversight in treatment) used to treat her cancer interacted with each other (either before treatment or within her body) to create some toxic compound.
Dmso is also used as a solvent for various chemicals. I used it the lab quite often. You have to be very careful because dmso is readily absorbed through the skin; and anything dissolved in it as well. I once spilled dmso on my hand and within about 10min I had the taste of garlic in my mouth.
DSMO topical cremes were (are?) a particularly popular snake-oil 'medicine' in some Latino communities in the 90s, including in SoCal. I recall cases of people getting poisoned by all sorts of strange substances (eg. clothing dyes) because they had slathered themselves in the DSMO. The chemical reaction chain Joe mentions is certainly possible (and seems likely at least part of the cause in this case), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some other substance involved that she absorbed which made the effects worse. There are a lot of things you won't pick up with a mass spec, especially if you aren't looking specifically for it.
@@heavnnnsent Why would he? DMSO is not toxic and is still used in medicine today. The whole point of the theory is that in very, very special circumstances it could be oxidized into something that is toxic
This is incredibly fascinating and a lot of the comments are super interesting. With a case like this it can be hard to remember that the subject of study was once a person, so the bit near the end about remembering the person who passed was really sweet. Heck even I got so invested into hearing all the theories that I started to forget the person at the center of all this. Then again this is the kind of stuff I love to learn about.
Ever hear of Lydia Fairchild? Very cool mystery. A woman who was an only child somehow gave birth to her non-existent sister's child. Totally explainable without the "woowoo" but still a cool true mystery story.
I stopped by again (watched this the other day) to tell you how happy I am having found your channel (and that there is so much more content to yet unearth here). Your sprawling diversity of interests seems pretty unique on youtube and it's just perfect for me, for many of us, who are just curious people w/o perhaps the time to do the work you are doing to do a topic justice. Your dry humor is great, even in more "serious" videos-I laugh allowed in surprise almost always a couple of times. I almost never comment on TH-cam, but came here to say this.
As a chemist, DMSO is really cool because it can carry other chemicals with it seamlessly into your body. Also, if you're near phosgene and you smell fresh cut grass but there isn't anyone near you mowing a lawn, look for the windsock and RUN.
Even horrible people smile sweetly when they're having a portrait photo taken. Let's just accept that none of us know anything about what kind of woman she was.
I knew what it was when you started describing the symptoms. My parents used to get DMSO to use on our horses when I was a kid. It was a smell you could taste, if that makes any sense.
This is absolutely and truly my favorite medical mystery case to this day! I love thinking about everything that could have caused this, and how this might change how we study and treat patients
@@soulife8383 Exactly. And about time this information got included to be taught about in elementary schools. Just like "don't drink and drive" is explained on why that is a bad combination and not socially accepted despite that some adults do it. Basically it should be "common sense" knowledge that one should have.
So the real mystery is why Gloria wasn't given enough pain relief to the point where she had to slather DMSO all over her body? The blood tests showed that she had Tylenol and codeine in her blood, so she was already taking a weak opioid with Tylenol, level 2 of the WHO analgesic ladder, surely doctors could've given her tramadol or something.
Often people of color are not prescribed the amount of pain killers as white patients. So my guess is racism probably didn’t help. People of color also tend to use more home remedies as a result of this inequity. This story is more sad then scary honestly.
@@calebn5330 This is a story from California, and she’s Hispanic. There’s not exactly a shortage of them around that area. Even looking at the names of the doctors in this story you can see a lot of Spanish names popping up. Frankly, I think it was probably just her prerogative to trust a home remedy that would keep her somewhat lucid instead of being doped up out of her mind. She had late stage cervical cancer, after all.
The New York City department of environmental protection has several water pollution control plants and sewage treatment plants and I am sure many people get all kinds of toxic stuff in their system from working at these I wonder if they become immune to it because of their frequent exposure?
The issue with hydrogen sulfide is, that you will only briefly smell it. After initial exposition the nerves in your nose are basically rendered useless and you don't smell a thing.
@@wotzefakiunot necessarily, if it remains at a low concentration like 10ppm (parts per million) it will continue to stink. However around 100ppm and above you will no longer be able to smell it.
I used to have it instilled in my bladder for interstitial cystitis. 30 years ago it was a standard treatment. I know I smelled garlicky after a treatment because my friends would mention it.
Except everything past the the moment where he pulled the "vapour point" out of his. There is no such thing . There is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature. I have not the slightest idea where did he take 148 celsius from. And the "explanation" that using vacuumed vials made it evaporate? Joe are you kidding me? You do realize that they are hermetically sealed with one way valve? The vapor pressure of DMS is 65 Pa and is sufficiently large to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C. Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K) Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes) Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
I worked in a lab for a while growing cell cultures, and we used DMSO all the time. We worked with pretty small amounts and wore gloves anyway to avoid contamination, but my supervisor said it was pretty harmless. I worked with a lot of stuff that was *not* pretty harmless, so I'm guessing by comparison it didn't register.
I’m a biotechnology product salesperson, and I’ve sold DMSO so many times to my customers that do cell culture, and sometimes had to deliver DMSO myself. I knew there are some hazards to it, but to this extent, wow!
@@UltraHanisah Yeah there were a few things where he was like "If you get this on your skin you have cancer now," so I'm guessing DMSO landed firmly in "this is fine" territory.
yeah, it’s pretty interesting stuff to learn as a fellow lab tech. i had to freeze some cells before and i know DMSO is used for cell freezing and it’s cytotoxic, but that’s about it. makes me kinda afraid of using DMSO now lol
Talking h2s gas, I work in the oil industry as a power engineer in Canada. We wear h2s monitors on site 12 hours a day as soon as you hit the main buildings. That stuff is so dangerous we have to take a yearly course on it, and the instructor without fail every year says “if you smell it working here, it’s probably already too late.” Pretty scary stuff.
Plumber here, hoisted a co worker out of a ventilated sewer with a man lift cable after he collapsed. It happened immediately after he disturbed a sludge pile in the manhole. He said "ohh my God that reeeks" and then kinda slumped over and was non responsive. Rapid motor lift and he was awake a few minutes later throwing up and nauseous. His h2s monitor started screaming immediately after he slumped
I heard a story years ago about a worker at the gold mine who goes to the doctor, very worried. he said a snake bit him, and immediately after biting him, the snake writhed and died. Doctor took samples, and found he had very high levels of cyanide in his blood, from working decades on a mine in the cyanide plant where gold was dissolved. He was fine, snake died from cyanide poisoning. Oh yes, also a lethal snake bite normally, but he was fine, aside from a headache.
@@aidanhammans9337 Small doses over a very long time, and a guy who would pass any fitness test with no issues. Knew one guy who, every year when asked his age, would reply "60", even though he had been doing it for a decade or more. He worked as an assistant for a mechanic, and we listened to his stories about his father coming back from "the Great War" when he was a child. And then about him working when the next war came around. At that time this put him at around 80, but he did not want to go on pension, and as he did not have a birth certificate, or any other paperwork, a common thing, he just kept on doing it.
@@aidanhammans9337 rasputin did the same thing ironically with the poison his killers tried to use on him tiny doses of poison smaller then the amount that would kill you obviously will let you build up a natural immunity like drinking tons of alcohol or smoking a carton a day to get the same effects they used to give you when you first started
This is a useful tale about understanding the difference in danger potential of natural vs. artificial toxins. Cyanide is, for example, a metabolic product of eating certain fruit kernels, and our body actually has the capacity to metabolize small quantities of it spread over a timespan with ease. After all, the poison is a highly concentrated form, basically total overkill. This would be evolutionary. We were exposed to those very natural toxins over a long time of history and thus adapted to a degree. We could claim the same about ethanol. I mean, geez, people are drinking a volatile harsh solvent! And it's even legal to sell it. ... Because we have developed ways to metabolize it. Same with mercury. The dose makes the poison. Or body detoxes all the time, according to its abilities, which will vary based on our level of health. Some substance known to accumulate in the body might only do so if the dosage-to-detox ratio is unfavorable. Chelation agents for example serve to get rid of certain unwanted particulates. Highly dosed chlorella is used after removal of amalgam tooth fillings to support detox of the mercury.
This was a classic Joe episode. The type of original material that leaves you on the edge of your seat trying to form a conclusion to some mystery. Great stuff, unfortunately I’m watching before clocking in at my hospital 😅
If she was covered in DMSO, whatever else was on her skin would have gotten into her bloodstream, as well as anyone else who touched her. The gel for defibrillator pads? The alcohol wipe for the blood draw? What if they used hibicleanse (sp?)? DMSO turns whatever is on your skin into something in your blood. Such a nifty chemical. I used it as a hangover cure back in the day because it gets into your system so much faster than oral medication. Gives you garlic breath though.
My neighbors uncle worked for Squibb Pharmaceutical and he use to bring my neighbor and me small bottles of DMSO for use on our sore muscles. It worked great except it gave a odd taste in your mouth and an oily patch where it was applied. We only used a very small amount on a small area and it worked. It sounded like the woman in your story was using way to much of the stuff.
I remember this incident. I haven't thought about it in years. I was on a Haz Mat team for a fire dept. so that's why it attracted our attention. It's unfortunate what happened to this woman. Have you ever done a video on spontaneous human combustion? I've always wondered if there is any validity to that or if it's an urban myth. I read a few articles about it years ago but not anything I felt confirmed it. Thanks for the video.
I've heard 'spontaneous human combustion' is usually caused by a mix of oxygen tanks, a smoker, and a person who's obese. Apparently fat burns like wax, so the remains turn into ash. Which is why often times hands and feet remain, because there's little to no fat to burn.
Spontaneous human combustion reports fell off as regulations around flammability of clothing and furniture were put in place. It seems most instances were people fell asleep or died while smoking and had a localized fire fed by the burning of their own body.
I remember this story when it first broke. I was an ER nurse at the time and was fascinated. A few months before, the er i was at had a patient brought in by ambulance who looked AWFUL. I was supposed to go off shift, but stayed to help land him cause he looked so bad. We cut off his clothes, was getting him on monitor, putting in an IV... We were shocked when he started swearing at us after looking him for the IV. We all thought he was comatose. Long story short, everyone who had been in that er room got horrifically sick with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. At least two people were hospitalized. I had showered immediately afterwards(again, i was going off shift) and flew across the country to go to a wedding. I had the most mild case... but afterwards, had chronic diarrhea, arthritis, and other health problems that lasted for 8 years; until i finally went on an antibiotic cocktail while doing an extended fast. There's a lot of weird stuff out there
@@sari9645 patient was diagnosed with "Dysentery", basically some bacterial diarrhea. No idea which type. I had a CT of my neck recently and they found evidence of reactive arthritis/Reiter's Syndrome, so it was likely either Shigella or Salmonella
Fun fact about DMSO- it's used in the horse world to reduce swelling and to help transport other topical medications past the skin barrier. It definitely smalls super garlicky!
@@lisak7247 : And _that_ also happens to be the reason why hyposprays are almost completely unknown outside of Star Trek- they drag along anything on the skin.
I actually have two containers of DMSO in my tack box right now. I'm going to be looking at it differently from now on. And yes, the garlic smell is awful. I accidentally got some DMSO on my hands while putting it on my horse's leg, and my sweat smelled like garlic for days. Ew.
Except that everything past "vapour point" is nonsense. There is no such thing, there is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature. DMS is volatile enough to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C. Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K) Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes) Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
i have been trying to look for good documentaries to watch especially bc I'm a history nerd, so I'm super glad you shared Curiosity with us! it's insane to think that it's less than $20 for the entire year!! I'm so grateful that you gave us the opportunity to sign up with a discount, thanks Joe! :D also, I remember hearing about the Toxic Lady a while back when learning about other unsolved mysteries. it's so sad that she went through all that and unintentionally hurt a lot of other people who wanted to help. hopefully we have more of an understanding of how these things work so something like this doesn't happen again.
Another way that the reaction could possibly happen would be when she was defibrillated. The oily substance on her chest would have been heated by the paddles (there is enough energy to burn skin if not done properly. It would also get spread through the air
I thought this could be a possibility too, most people who you’d work a cardiac arrest on are pretty wet and sweaty but the ER staff specifically say she had a odd shine, maybe the paddles electrified the chemical on her skin and released it into the air.
I remember when there was a big DMSO craze. Some major league baseball pitcher was using it on his elbow, then it exploded into every sport, and of course it became a home remedy for everything. My uncle was using it for something. The odd thing was that as soon as it touched your skin, you got a strong taste of garlic in the mouth. Anyway, it turns out to have some serious side effects, was less effective than other stuff (like aspirin), and people quit using it.
That taste is actually it being transported through your bloodstream to your tongue! DMSO penetrates the skin readily and ends up circulating in the blood, where it then leaks out through the capillaries in your tongue so you can taste it. Interestingly saccharin will also do this, which is why after drinking certain diet sodas the aftertaste can linger in your mouth for quite a long time after finishing the drink. It's not actually in your mouth, it's in your bloodstream.
On a note about DMSO, it is an excellent transdermal carrier agent. Which is a danger of handling DMSO. It can dissolve some chemicals and carry them across the lipid layer of skin tissue. In some studies I've read they used DMSO as a drug administration method.
It should be noted that it is an effective transfer agent for many other organic materials one of which happens to be latex. This seems noteworthy as this is also what standard medical gloves are made of. Since the medical team had no idea that it was present they wouldn't have known to use suitable alternative PPE. As such there is a possibility that something might actually have got transferred through contact even through their protective gloves. Seems like it would potentially only take a few touching her then through touching equipment and such transferred potentially contaminated DMSO to other staff that way.
I really enjoyed the video, but want to point something about out the brief comment @7:45 about how those affected weren't "shrinking violets" but were experienced ER doctors and nurses who routinely dealt with critical ill patients (and weird smells). You don't need to look any further than police officers who develop immediate respiratory distress or faint when they have physical contact with suspected fentanyl to realize that anyone can develop a psychogenic reaction in the right circumstances. (Brief skin contact with fentanyl is completely, 100% safe and does not cause physical illness)
I can remember where I was when this story broke. I was at work where we always had on KYW News radio out of Philly. Thanks Joe for the trip down memory lane with a truly bizarre story!
Your video got me to like, and your compassion for the original victim compelled me to subscribe. Great content. From, an Aussie that watches TH-cam when I should be sleeping.
In 2007, a friend gave me DMSO to use on a couple of warts. I used it and was shocked to find that I could *taste* it within 5 minutes or so. I guess it goes through your skin pretty easily. That scared me enough that I never used it again.
It's not particularly dangerous by itself, but if you ever use it again you should absolutely be careful to clean the area that you'll be applying it to thoroughly, and then apply a waterproof bandage to keep anything undesired from contacting the area- it essentially makes the skin "leaky", which can be useful for administering medications, and dangerous if anything _unintended_ comes in contact with the area.
The only difference between the DMSO and anything else you absorb through your skin (lotion, sunscreen, etc) is that you happen to be able to detect the DMSO in your taste buds. It all ends up throughout your body.
Dimethyl sulphate isn't a "nerve gas", not even remotely. Nerve gasses work on the nervous system, as the name implies, more specifically they prevent the break down of acetyl choline which causes muscle paralysis. Dimethyl sulphate is an alkylating agent, and was originally used as a war gas though, just not as a nerve agent.
DMSO is actually a really crazy chemical. It will carry chemicals dissolved in it into the blood stream. I worked for a guy that worked as a pathologist for the New York CSI during the 50’s. He told a story about a girl that was murdered by her boyfriend. He had painted the steering wheel of her car with DMSO that he had dissolved snake venom into. To this day, that’s the craziest chemistry story I’ve ever heard.
I actually use DMSO quiet a bit. It's a really neat solvent
Did he tell you how they figured out he was the killer? I'm wondering how forensics would even approach a situation like that.
@@jazzfeline5970 he did. She had no puncture wounds at all. Just a slight rash on her hands. Since she tested positive for snake venom, they knew it had to be injected and not swallowed, so they checked the body again and found nothing. The detectives found out that the boyfriend worked at the New York Zoo as a snake handler. If not for that direct tie, they wouldn't have ever known. He milked a snake for months, so it was definitely first degree.
@@brockevans1558 How do you milk a snake??
@@samwhaleIV....carefully. You basically let it bite the top of a vessel and it squirts it's venom into the tube/cup.
Two interesting things about DMSO, which is a commonly used solvent in organic chemistry: it’s a very effective topical anesthetic. It also is easily absorbed by the skin into the bloodstream, often taking its solute with it.
Which leads me to this true, but slightly embarrassing story that occurred during my undergraduate days as a chemistry major. I was working in the chem lab on an organic synthesis project and (here’s the embarrassing part) I was not wearing gloves. I did not realize that one of my fingers made contact with a test tube containing bromine dissolved in DMSO. Bromine is very caustic and it really burns if you were to spill some on your skin…..unless said skin is numb because it’s been treated with a topical anesthetic like, say, DMSO. In which case, the bromine can painlessly penetrate and burn its way through the skin. In, my case, to the bone.
When I glanced down at my hand, I noticed it was orange-tinged by the bromine. I also couldn’t help notice that I was staring at one of my finger bones, exposed through a sizable chemical burn. I wasn’t shocked or grossed out. Rather, I had three simultaneous thoughts: 1) I’m gonna get in trouble for not wearing gloves; 2) Pretty cool that this does not hurt at all; 3) I probably should go to the hospital.
Fortunately, the University’s chemistry lab was directly across the street from the medical school and hospital, where my father just happened to be an attending surgeon. I strolled into his office, finger raised, saying, "Hi Dad, I think I should get this treated." He went white as a ghost (no, not from any toxic gas emissions), grabbed me by the finger and dragged me to the ED to have my wound attended to. They did a great job; I still have all of my fingers and no scar!
Good times!
Wow what a story. Glad it turned out all right...imagining that burn was a huge YIKES for me.
wowww, that's absolutely astounding and kind of amazing that you didn't feel any pain. my first thought was because DMSO is a topical anesthetic, once the skin was burnt past the dermis or so you would feel pain, but then I figured that the DMSO is so readily absorbed into the skin that it basically was carried all the way down to the bone as the bromide burned your tissue. not a chemistry major so that might not be the proper explanation, but wow. that's a really fascinating story, and of course I'm really glad that you ended up being okay.
Shame there's no scar; it would have presented amazing opportunities to talk about your story.
Can you imagine the terror your father had? Lol
Your child comes into your office and says “hey, I think this is a bad thing” and they’re missing part of their finger
Remember kids: protective glasses, lab coat, gloves, closed shoes.
While I was an undergraduate, a graduate student was doing an organic chemistry synthesis. He dissolved cyanide in DMSO. But he dropped the flask containing the solution, and when the flask shattered, he was splashed with the cyanide -- which immediately entered his blood. He nearly died, but because the doctors knew what the poison was, he survived.
Holy crap. Imagine concocting the most deadly thing you can concoct and dropping it
My friend's brother, Wolfgang, was a 4th year chemistry student and was doing an experiment during a class, following a written set of instructions. At a certain point in the experiment, the expected result of a certain action didn't match what the instructions said: the new substance was the wrong colour. Wolfgang took the test tube up to the professor teaching the class to ask what had gone wrong. The professor only had a brief glimpse of the substance before it literally blew up in his face. Wolfgang had made nitroglycerine! Fortunately, neither the professor nor anyone else was seriously hurt, although Wolfgang's normally brown hair turned a strange shade of reddish brown until it grew out.
@@hughmungus1767 -- OMG They were both lucky to have survived. Here on TH-cam, a guy treated glycine (an amino acid) with nitrous acid. He was surprised by a bright blue product ... that tended to explode (sodium dinitrosomethanide).
Which is why you always have sodium thiosulfate on hand when working with cyanide. Everyone knows that.
@@dilbot1512 you never heard of the sodi thio - cyan thingy, where you been?
About the "woman were more effected, as were those who skipped dinner"--this supports the DSMO theory as well. The ones likely handling the vial of blood affected by the vacuum were probably mostly nurses (primarily female at the time), and anyone who skipped a meal is going to be more heavily affected by a potential drug in the air.
Facts! Hell, everyone knows to skip dinner if you want the vodka to hit harder and longer.
facts because nurses never have a chance to sit and eat or drink
and their conclusion was uterus hysteria.... brilliant.
good on that nurse for suing, to bad she had to go though that.
I'm a chemist who works with DMSO, and the hazard that we worry about is it's ability to carry other chemicals with it into the bloodstream. This means that another chemical (a topical medicine, or makeup or an accidental spill) could have been transported into her bloodstream by DMSO.
And it works in reverse as well, DMSO can bring things through and out that normally would stay put.
This is exactly what I was thinking. DMSO could have been transporting all manner of compounds, and it tracks with the garlic smell.
That's what I was thinking to begin with. I'm glad he talked about DMSO which is what I suspected, but he didn't say it was a carrier chemical. In fact the reason it was banned in the 1970's was precisely because it carried chemicals through the skin. (There was an episode of _Quincy_ on this). I think low were using it to deliver illicit drugs inside themselves.
I don't think that she was exposed so anything that could have led to such a outcome when she went through chemotherapy and suffered badly from cancer. But what do you think about the suggested solution in the video and about the open questions?
@@Nitidus Anything in the atmosphere that she came into contact with could have been absorbed into her skin. Also her chemotherapy could have been pulled out of her skin and went through the gloves of the ER staff.
RIP Gloria. I really liked that he reminded the viewers that ultimately this was a human being that was suffering tremendously and who know what agonizing hell her final hours were like.
she literally committed crimes against humanity
@@polocatfan You didn't watch the video did you? This lady had cancer and its speculated she applied DMSO to her skin for pain relief, DMSO is fairly innocuous but due to a series of events that happened after she was uncoscious and dying (such as being administered oxygen, the heat from the defibrillator and the sudden low pressure of the blood draw container) turned the DMSO into another toxic chemical. How exactly does this mean she "literally" commited a crime against humanity?
The ambulance may have helped take her early. Rip.
You stated this perfectly. She was a human suffering from cancer and had no intention of hurting anyone. My heart goes out to her family that must have been not only upset that she died but other people were hurt accidentally as well.
31 years old. Far too young.
I watched this in real time. The hazmat guys were there when I went to bed. In the morning people were so uncomfortable about it the news agencies started to sweep it under the rug. Over the last quarter century it almost became urban legend. Thanks for covering the facts, the unknown, and doing it respectfully. Curious if women, generally, having more fat and less muscle, compared to men, absorbed more during the incident.
That's an astute point with the fatty/muscle tissue ratio, great observation!
For those interested: It's well known that many drugs (and I guess biologically active chemicals in general) *_may_* affect women somewhat differently in equal doses compared to men because of this (women having a higher fat percentage than men), as it means that water-soluble drugs will be more dilute in the "average" male's bloodstream. Additionally, the often significant differences in total body mass also affect this.
Meanwhile, with drugs/chemicals soluble in fatty tissues the effect can be reversed, although I believe it's a bit more complicated in that regard as things soluble in fats tends to accumulate in it and stay in the body for much longer (which is why blood tests can determine if you smoked weed for such a long time afterwards).
Thing I love about Joe is not only the detailed, humorous and scientific approach, but also the respectful part
There's the additional issue many of the standards for drug testing and progression are primarily performed on men and that causes significant issues with accurate information about how drugs affect women.
They use broader models now relative to the once "perfect man" at 5'10' caucasian 150 lbs
fake news
8:05 ah yes. The classic loss of bone density from a panic attack
hate it when that happens!
How do you know that event caused that? She could have had that condition already and not been aware of it.
@@chrisbarnett5303 I was just making a joke about how ridiculous it was that the medical professionals dismissed it as a panic attack.
@@SerialDesignation-L_heheh It was most likely just panic attack though, not ridiculous at all that medical professionals came to that conclusion
@@chrisbarnett5303 I don’t want to fight with a stranger, so I’ll just say that I respectfully disagree.
I remember hearing about this in the 90s. As I recall, the article stated she'd been receiving medication mixed with DMSO as a transdermal vehicle. We used to use it all the time to get meds into horses just by rubbing it on their skin. You wear rubber gloves but it still goes through them and you taste garlic pretty fast.
When I studied chemistry, we were always told to be careful with DMSO for that reason. It's not toxic itself, but makes your skin permeable for other chemicals.
That’s super interesting and thank you! Do you happen to remember what kinds of meds needed a transdermal vehicle? Have these drugs been updated to a better or different vehicle? I’m racking my brains but the only transdermal I can think of right now is the patch. There must be, or was at one time, others…?
@@MartijnterHaar Yeah, I came here to look for this exact comment. Just like you said, DMSO itself is not particularly harmful, but it's a fantastic solvent any anything dissolved in it will carry right through the skin. Thus in the lab we are very careful around DMSO.
In german it is called "Pferdebalsam" ("horse balm") for this widespread use in horses.
This whole thread is interesting
Just a little note, women can be just as sexist toward women as men. I had female boss once, and I was the only woman on staff. She paid me the least and was constantly making disparaging remarks to and about me. It was so bad it made my male coworkers uncomfortable. I've seen other incidents but that was the most egregious. I always enjoy your videos. Thank you!!
Jeez, you'd think she had a little more compassion for a fellow woman in the workplace. Then again, I've also seen the opposite in the reverse situation. People can be such assholes.
110% I'd venture to say even more so. Snide men remarks.
Yep, it’s called internalized misogyny. Putting down other women in the hopes that men will view you as “one of the boys.”
Yeah that stuff is crazy to see for me as a guy. I don’t understand what the thought process is for them. I feel like it almost shows a lack of confidence in your identity as a woman or something. Like, they equate certain qualities that they don’t have with feminity, and so they try to assert their identity as females by acting fkn prudish. Like the female equivalent of an incel or a white knight.
Especially older woman, who drank the patriarchal kool-aid. Religion can have a hell of an impact too.
About women being more affected by what happened, I remember hearing a while ago that you shouldn't wear makeup to protests because it can make the effects of tear gas worse. Maybe something like that could also explain why women seemed to be more negatively affected if this were a gas/vapor, if it were sticking to the foundation, moisturizer, etc on their skin maybe they'd experience effects like burning skin more strongly than men would?
depends on the makeup I guess. Someone from another comment mentioned that fat - which is in some makeup - absorbs better
I heard something like that too. Something about the make-ups chemical make up :P
Pun intended
plenty of other people saying DMSO can carry other chemicals into the bloodstream- maybe it forced makeup chemicals into their bloodstreams?
@@beebs4283 considering this happened in the early 90s the different chemicals in makeup at the time could very possibly have contributed to it. I don't really know any makeup history and ingredients beyond early victorian, edwardian, and the radium girls so its pure speculation on my part.
@@murasakirin8998 makeup being toxic is just so believable given the history of it 😬 so yep I buy that
My mom has a toenail fungus, one day she put DMSO on it with a little silicone toe cover. It began to hurt so she took it off. She was shocked to see her toe had shriveled into a raisin. It took a couple weeks to go back to normal. Didn’t get rid of the fungus.
# true story trust me bro
@@ES11777 I also used dmso on my toe but not for fungus but for a wart and it also shriveled up like a raisin
Tablespoon of bleach in a gallon of water. Soak for 20 minutes 5 days in a row.
I actually used DMSO on a raisin fungus on my wart, and it shriveled up like a toe
@@numbersstationsarchive194 hate it when it happens
I remember this case. When they came out and said it was mass psychosis I said BS. Too many observations indicated something chemical had happened to affect the professionals in that room.
Agreed. Imagine, losing actual bone density and concluding the cause was all in your head! That's what i call being deliberately obtuse (or just plain corrupt) Hope that nurse won her court case.
the whole idea of mass psychosis is ridiculous. The individual affliction suddenly spreads through a group by...suggestion? Telepathy? There is no idea what mechanism is involved, so it's like you're being asked to believe in magic.
True, but that's doctors for you, if they can't figure out the problem then it's a mental illness and "all in your head".
Yeah it did sound like a "we couldn't figure it out" answer.
@@christinemccrea4371 Mass psychogenic illness (not psychosis) is unfortunately a real thing and people obviously aren't asked to believe anything. You see someone else's symptoms and "copy" them. A recent case was with a youtube channel from someone with tourette's going viral and a significant uptick in young people looking for help with sudden onset tourette's like symptoms.
As a chemist I've used lots of DMSO. Everyone hated using it. It used to be used in medical patches to administer medicine through the skin. So care needs to be taken when handling it because the DMSO will transport it through the skin. I understand that Gloria was in advanced stages of cervical cancer and probably using a lot of the DMSO cream, hence the oily sheen on her body. DMSO does smell a bit garlicy but the lower purity DMSO smells like garbage. It induces the gagging reflex due to the impurities of diethyl sulfide and dimethyl sulfide. If you get DMSO on your skin, you can taste it, and it is absolutely disgusting, like someone emptied a garbage can in your mouth. Sadly, I think a simpler explanation can be concluded. She used lots of lower purity DMSO cream and these impurities built up due to her condition. When one or more hospital staff touched her skin they absorbed some of the DMSO and impurities and reacted they way they did. DMSO is a white solid below 18C which would appear as a yellow solid when they drew blood and it cooled.
The video says her family denied that she had ever used it. Though, my first thought at that point was that maybe she didn't know she was using it, because it was under a different name or something.
But they wore gloves?
@@SurvivalSquirrel Good question. The gloves they wore back then were latex. Offers protection against bacteria or virus' but doesnt offer protection against industrial solvents. In about 2001 chemical labs had moved to using nitrile gloves (usually purple, green or blue) which offer much better protection against a wider range of chemicals. If they'd used nitrile gloves, this wouldnt have happened. Manufacturers publish charts of breakthrough times for gloves. Hope this helps.
@@renakunisaki This is most likely-even to the point that perhaps a fellow patient/friend gave her some in an unmarked container from a larger one. Perhaps as you said the bottle was labeled differently. We all know people who kept medications from ten or twenty years ago to the point they may have been labeled differently. There's always a grandma out there with Vaseline from 1978. The possibilities are endless.
I agree, I’m an immunologist & we use DMSO to dissolve drugs for cell culture treatment. I’ve always been so wary of using DMSO because of the health risks. (And shockingly, DMSO can be purchased by anyone from Amazon!)
We used to use DMSO on our horses as a topical treatment for strains, etc. My best show horse (Arabian) was prone to laminitis (a very painful hoof condition) and one vet gave DMSO in an IV to see if it would help. The horse smelled like a giant clove of garlic until it worked it's way out of his system.
@Daniel Meyers Not for his feet, but it worked great on muscle strains etc.
@@보예노지-e6k Wish I could read your comment, or is there a translation feature that I don't know about?
@@bevinboulder5039 I think it's a spam bot of some kind, translated into something like 'I'll show you with good fun'.
@@I05-e4s Oooh. I'll be sure to recognize this MO in the future.
@@bevinboulder5039 it doesn't show a Google translate button underneath the comment for you? It does on my tablet but I'm not sure how as I know nothing about tech.
Yeah, I don’t put much stock in her family’s rejection of the DMSO theory. Seems like they just don’t want to acknowledge that this could have been her fault in any way.
(Which is dumb. How could she possibly have foreseen this outcome? She did nothing wrong, even if her actions led to this.)
feelings can make the smartest people dumb.
You literally just made baseless assumptions and called her family dumb for not backing one of many theories built 100% on speculation.
@@asparagusstaging430 Did you watch the video? It has evidentiary support. Learn what ‘speculation’ means.
Also, yeah. I do think they’re being dumb. That’s the whole point of my comment. Grieving people can be very, very dumb. Strong emotion does that to people.
After refreshing my memory with the Wikipedia article, I now recall that DMSO was used as an alternative (unproven) cancer treatment. (It's currently available on the internet.) Gloria Ramirez, who had cervical cancer, may have used it for that purpose. And the family might have denied it.
@@norman_5623 This is a good point, and if there was insurance or lawsuits involved, they wouldn't have wanted to admit that her own actions led to that outcome, accidental or not.
My memory from the early 1980s is that DMSO was considered an amazing universal solvent - notable for its ability to penetrate human flesh in a way that was unparalleled. One of the symptoms of DMSO exposure was anyone so exposed would have garlic breath - yup, a drop on your hand could give you garlic breath. It was seen as potentially offering a method of dispersing medicine without the need for an injection. This was a big enough deal that I recall a Time Magazine cover feature on it - and, in typical journalist fashion, it made DMSO sound wonderful as well as potentially toxic. It is entirely plausible that the toxic patient could have used it since it was rumored to treat cancer as well as mitigate pain. She would not have needed to rub it all over herself - given its propensity to disperse widely from a single location.
This story has always fascinated me. I do recall from other research that the DMSO theory also took into consideration that she was "shocked" with a defibrillator, which could have superheated her body for a brief period of time, possibly causing chemicals to be aerosolized briefly. Unbelievably interesting story, regardless.
Insignificant heat from a defibrillator; the impulses are not all that powerful and are extremely short.
Absolutely incorrect. I've seen burns from defibrillator pads on patients who have coded who have not had an oily substance on their skin.
No need for that crazy theory, the creator of the video clearly isn't a chemist. C2H6O4S would be volatile at normal body temperature in high enough concentration, this is likely why the patient died only 30 minutes after admission. Edit: Furthermore the DMSO can act as a carrier and even particulate that landed on exposed skin could be absorbed.
@@darwinawardrecipient955 nothing you said negates the video. What's with the "clearly not a chemist" jab? The fart sniffing isn't necessary
@@Fresh_Biscuits Don't worry I'm not a chemist and won't release any videos claiming knowledge of chemistry I don't have. But I will call out a dumbass who is knowingly or out of sheer incompetence spreading misinformation. Sincerely, smell my farts
All my life, doctors have told patients it was in their heads way too often.
Many people suffer for years before proving they have something with a new test. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for example, now called post viral syndrome, was treated as psycho psomatic for decades before being proved to be a real testable thing.
Post Vital Fatigue or Post Viral Syndrome is the precursor to CFS (now knows as myalgic encephalomyelitis) if you have PVF for a period of more than (I think it’s 6 months now?) it’s then diagnosed as CFS/ME, though many developed it from something other than PVF.
I’ve been diagnosed with CFS/ME for about 16yrs now, and as far as I know there’s no actual test for it, just ruling out everything else? Then again it’s only considered a real thing by like 50% of the medical population here in Australia so I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ve missed out on some sudden breakthrough 🙄
I've had chronic fatigue my whole life (I have ehlers danlos fibromyalgia and a million comorbids) I didn't find any help until I got put on stimulants for ADHD.
I go into anaphylactic shock.
Went to an allergy specialist eventually to try and learn more.
He told me I was just having panic attacks.
I suggested I eat an orange in his office (that's my nemesis) and he could watch the results, but he wasn't interested.
Never been diagnosed with panic attack before or since.
Another lazy doctor. Yeah, I'm 70 and I've become a tad cynical.
I had neck pain and dizziness symptoms for over a year. No one found anything and told me it was all my imagination. Finally found out I had a fractured C1 C2 vertebra.
How well I know this how it was with CFS. I have Fibromyalgia. Well, now thousands perhaps millions more people are right here with me and with Long Covid Syndrome. But, I found something of use for some of us at least. A neurological Doctor in England found the compression of our midsection and legs will keep the blood in our upper body longer and give us more energy and stamina. I wear compression of the midsection with attached back brace, no leg compression and it works for me. Good luck all you CFS, Fibromyalgia, Long Term Covids out there may you find good compression.....ha, ha, and may the force be with you...
I remember this story being covered on Buzzfeed unsolved. Someone in the comments seemed to have solved it, saying that one of the treatments for cervical cancer at that time would've caused the reaction that emitted the poison and would explain everything. I can no longer find the comment otherwise I'd credit the person and get more details.
DMSO (Dimethyl Sulfoxide) would explain the garlic scent. One interesting thing about it is, while not toxic on its own, it can very easily ferry compounds that would normally be blocked by the skin through the skin. Depending on the type of gloves they were using, it could have gone through those too
@@samarnadra As far as I can gather, most Latex gloves do not provide adequate protection against DMSO. So I suppose it’s possible that they absorbed bad stuff through their gloves and skin
@@flightlesschicken7769 Correct. The MSDS for DMSO now states to use non-latex gloves when handling. Latex, while protective is still porous enough for DMSO to pass through and as it passes through, it will pickup any crud along the way, so silicon oil used to keep the gloves from sticking to the forms and the talc used inside the gloves.
DMSO was once used as a component of certain types of chemical triggers, until it was discovered the crud literally could go through most natural products like latex, rubber and ceramics.
damn that is crazy. that's the main part that confused me - how it got into her blood :O
So true. Common things that people don't think of also, like wood panels or anything plastic made from abs . First time I used dmso on my hand ( dupytrens contracture) with vitamin e, about 5 mins after absorption I was peeling agrapefruit watching something and I actually bit my lip chewing on a non existent peice of grapefruit cause I could taste it just through hand contact .
@@MrDmadness huh, interesting
Speaking of phosgene, I vaguely recall an incident at an indoor swimming pool in England where a number of smokers attending the pool wound up generating it in their lungs from the chlorine in the air mixed with chemicals from their smoking in their lungs, or something to that effect. They basically got gassed by going to the pool.
Wow
thats fucking WILD
Smoking is bad for your health!
There are definitely indoor pools that have so much chlorine put in the water that you can smell it at the entrance. Not at all surprised lol
@@Kimmie6772 a lot of times what you're smelling are chloramines, which means there's actually not enough chlorine in there
Just because her family hadn't heard of DMSO it doesn't mean she wasn't using it. She would have been buying it from some shady person because in the 90's you couldn't buy DMSO in stores or anything. I know this because I used to work for a vet that used it in his clinic, he had to get his from Mexico, he vacationed there every year and bought a number of supplies down there for use in his clinic.
I don't know anything else that would give her skin the oily appearance and garlic smell. That sounds like classic DMSO (I used to accidentally get it on myself all the time, the oily thing is caused by your own oil glands and the smell doesn't go away for days).
The thing I'm not buying here is the nerve agent. If the proposed nerve agent acts more like tear gas, what other nerve agent could have been created? Was there something in her body along with the DMSO that interacted with everything else?
I think like many things in life we will never know the exact nerve agent. The fact that one person ended up with bone disease is weird, did she have some hidden genetic thing going on that triggered by the nerve agent? Why was she the only one that it happened to?
What a weird situation!!
Or maybe she already had this bone disease. And this incident just made her aware of this. Many many unknowns
@@douggaudiosi14 Agreed, she may have had something wrong for a while that was exposed/accelerated. Crazy mystery.
It's already been pointed out by others, but DMSO is actually often used as a solvent, both in chemical laboratories as a general-purpose solvent and by veterinarians to administer drugs to horses (and maybe other animals, idk) because it lets them apply the drug, mixed with/dissolved in DMSO, to the skin as an ointment of sorts, and the DMSO then transports it through the skin and into the body. In other words: the DMSO could've been used to ferry other, nastier things into that poor woman's bloodstream. Although it's well worth remembering that no other things were actually found in the toxicological analyses.
@@mnxs Yeah I used to be a vet tech. In the early 90's our clinic had a hard time sourcing DMSO so our vet would pick it up in Mexico. Nasty stuff, he always warned us to make sure we washed our hands/forearms before using it because it would carry whatever is on your skin into your bloodstream. Very dangerous stuff.
@@mnxs it's also worth remembering that there was a period of time between sample draw and analysis. Some materials will break down over time and you may not find them, especially using mid 90s technology.
Thank you so much for covering this woman’s death. I have read about it a long time ago, and this is the best explanation of what happened to her and the people who tried to save her that night.
Okay Joe - want to hear something amazing? In February, 1994 I was a 4th year medical student who did a rotation with California Poison Control at San Francisco General Hospital. I was there when this call came in from that emergency room and it was our main topic of discussion for the rest of my elective!
Nice overview, by the way. Though a good bit of that is stuff that happened after I moved on from my elective. I did get interviewed, though, and asked to give a brief summary of the case at a toxicology conference a couple months after.
I can add that we speculated on the DMSO pretty early on - it is still widely used as a carrier to bring medications thru the skin; it is absorbed so quickly that it drags other molecules (drugs) that normally don't get thru the skin so well with it. We were suspicious with this oily sheen pretty quickly - we thought topical or home remidies about this also. And she also had a Hickman or Mediport (a large IV which goes into a large vein near the heart - common for chemotherapy patients). The thing we were hung up on, though, was the "knock out" power of whatever happened. And, by the way, at the time the report we had was that people did not start passing out until the patient vomited into a basin - we thought there could be something in her stomach contents with knock-out potential, and there just are not that many chemicals which will make people collapse in just seconds. Not even this Dimethyl Sulfate nerve gas, as you mentioned, which, by the way, was not at all on our radar.
One such group of knock-out chemicals are a class called "Azides." They are very active nitrogen compounds, which makes them very useful - most notably: in air bags. A spark sets off some azide powder stored in the air bag and it decomposes explosively into mostly nitrogen gas which inflates the air bag.
And this lady had a family member who worked in a factory which made air bags for car manufacturers. We were wondering if it was possible she ingested some of this powder. It is very poisonous; it brought up many questions about a possible suicide attempt. But we were the Poison Control Center - it was our job to think about stuff like that. And there were other theories at the time. Her acetylcholinesterase blood activity levels were undetectable - which is related to how pesticides (and she did have a garden shed, though I don't recall if she was actually a gardner) and nerve gas work - by inactivating cholinesterase. I remember we recommended that her Hickman should be particularly evaluated to see if there was any trace of chemicals which were injected into it, but I was already off service by then and I don't know what came of it.
Fun (if tragic) little trip down memory lane!
Maybe the DMSO could have been contaminated with the airbag chemical and gotten into her that way?
Very interesting addition btw 👍
Always fun to see something from your past randomly show up online as consumer content.
Did the nurses also have low cholinesterase?
I am with you on home remedies. I was living one town over when this happened and every Latino family I knew lived on 'home remedies' for EVERY ailment.
Wouldn't pesticides (or azides) have been detected during the autopsy?
Defibrillation......spark causing explosive reaction......
I get unreasonably angry every time I hear a medical mystery explained off as hysteria.
And all the men believing it like ah yes these hysterical uterus creatures get riled up so easily
It is a medical term call what you will delirium is the new word now
@@revilivaille7861 The hysteria conclusion was literally derived by two women if you watched the video…
@@revilivaille7861 not sure if you watch the video but it was women who made up that decision
Sounds like you're suffering from hysteria, getting angry for a perfectly reasonable medical explanation 😂😉
A similar incident happened here in Pittsburgh back around that same time. A patient was brought in that sickened the E.R. doctor and and nurses. They suggested that it was because he had been using insecticides at home. I think I heard that the doctor died. The story dropped from the news cycle and was never covered again making me wonder what really happened.
Yeah is was really weird how fast these stories got swept under the rug.
@@atomicskull6405 “Swept under the rug” isn’t quite the right term, because what stops them from being reported on more is mostly HIPAA and media laziness.
Once the initial shock is gone, it’s very difficult to legally report on specific medical cases because of patient confidentiality laws.
@@ZeteticPhilosopher HIPPA didn't go into effect until 1996. Usually rare cases like this show up as case studies without any identifying patient information after a while. For these cases to just kind of disappear is odd.
Parasite eve irl
@@ThatGirlJD Which is why you can get information on this case which is not available for most others.
And yes, rare cases do show up as case studies, but these are not obviously associated with news sources, and are too dense for the average person to read through. Nothing has disappeared.
This is one of those Unsolved Mysteries I remember as a kid and always knew there was some scientific explanation but just couldn’t even begin to think of where it might start. This was a really fascinating episode that ebbed a long, long-standing mystery from my childhood. Bravo and thank you!
I love your mystery videos, I always come away from them feeling like I got a satisfactory explanation from it. You make sure to cover details that other channels don't and round things off with theories or answers that make me think it's pretty much been solved. I'd love more of these kinds of videos, where you take a scientific and level headed approach into other unexplainable events in history.
If you like mystery videos, check out the "MrBallen" channel.
Everything past the the moment where he pulled the "vapour point" out of his * is nonsense. There is no such thing . There is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature. I have not the slightest idea where did he take 148 celsius from. And the "explanation" that using vacuumed vials made it evaporate? Joe are you kidding me? You do realize that they are hermetically sealed with one way valve?
The vapor pressure of DMS is 65 Pa and is sufficiently large to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C.
Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K)
Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes)
Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
SaintPhoeniix, I like Joe's content and his tone of voice, but most of the toxic chemical should be in the vials and not floating around the entire emergency ward. I'm not an expert in anything, other than a stupid know-it-all in TH-cam comment sections, but I don't think that enough could escape from the vials, especially, when they are sealed enough after disconnecting them.
I get standard tests every year, and I see that they seem to be covered with a rubbery top, which seals when the entire vial is disconnected. The toxic chemical would have to build up so much that there would be enough to crystallize and some gas would push out of the elasticized hole.
@@eugenetswong exactly. Nothing would leak from the vials. Moreover, Joe made up the fact that they used vacutainers. Although they were invented in 1949, the plastic version was only created in early 90s. Ramirez's case happened in 1994 which makes it unlikely that they already have switched to vacutainers in that hospital. Besides, Joe points out that nurse said the blood had strange smell. She would've smelled nothing if vacutainers were used.
Besides, even if they would just pour her blood on the floor it would have to contain not just *_some_* DMS but rather large amount - more then 10% I would guess. Which is simply impossible. DMS vapors (if it was indeed DMS) probably came from her body. With breath, sweat and direct diffusion out of blood vessels through the skin.
@@artiomvas I'm glad that you mentioned the dates. After I submitted my reply, I wondered about that technology and time period.
Also, even if they opened her up and scooped her blood by the cup, it would still not explain why she didn't suffer the same symptoms. With a lot of gases affecting the lungs, that happens there, because that is where a lot of moisture is...*I think*. I'm fortunate enough to know that I don't know what I'm talking about, but my point is that her blood should have had big symptoms, I'd think.
It almost makes me wonder if she was completely unrelated, and it turned out to be a sewage problem, where a sink p-trap [or whatever it's called] let in sewage gas. Or maybe there was back flow in the ventilation. I could imagine hospital admin not wanting to invite an investigation on their own mistakes.
It reminds me of college, when a foreign smell was in a washroom. Nobody recognized it, and if I recall correctly, I sniffed around until I smelled the strongest source from a drain on the floor. I used 2 hands to take water and pour it in there. It might have been somebody else's idea, though.
Do you know if toxic odors could come out of a dry drain and cause the symptoms in the video?
By the way, thanks for discussing this. I hate how comment sections seem to be almost only fans saying nice things about the content creator, instead of talking about the topic.
DMSO gets used frequently (not that I agree) as a bladder instillation for patients with diagnoses such as Painful Bladder Syndrome or Interstitial Cystitis.
And yeah, on those days the whole surgery center smells like a garlic chopping factory.
No poisonings or worse yet. I'll make sure the nursing staff don't allow for any vacuum formation in anyone's bladder.
It also requires super-saturation of oxygen.
I have ic, have had dmso never felt any smell
It is DMSO in topical snake-oil ointments which is particularly dangerous. Folks getting poisoned by absorbing the dyes from their clothes and all sorts of craziness
PS: I'm 2 min into the video and jumped to the comments to say DMSO ;)
Used DMSO in some of my biology experiments as a graduate student. Yes it has a garlicky smell and penetrates your skin very quickly and you will smell that garlicky odour in your nose.
Hope to goodness that urine samples aren't collected via cystocentesis ...it would cause a temporary vacuum in the bladder. I am joking...the vacuums created by a syringe are 2 or 3 ml at most .. and exist for a minute. TOPS... This theory is swine cleanser (hog wash).
the question unanswered is: did the DMSO theorie convince the court enough, so that the insurance company had to pay?
I googled but could not find anything past 1994.
Which makes me guess it was settled with an agreement "not to disclose" any details.
The workers compensation insurance was through the state of California and not a private entity. That having been said, I don’t know.
If one of the family members recommended the DMSO or was involved in the use of it, of course they would deny any knowledge of it. They would probably be full of fear and guilt.
No Gloria was the one searching for alternate natural treatments before starting radiation treatment
or, she used it and they truly did not know.
It's also entirely possible that she used it and had also never heard of it. If she were pursuing alternative treatments, it's possible someone gave it to her or sold it to her without being explicit about what was in it.
This is so sad :( Rest in Peace Gloria. You were not a toxic lady. You were just unlucky.
💚💚💚
No. Don't romanticize it.
She quite literally became a hazard.
@@DominusDolorum you say that like she chose to get sick like that. Lol. Sympathy ≠ romanticization. Get a grip
@@ascorbicpng none of what you just said made any sense to me, I'm sorry sometimes certain phrasing confuses me. I'm just not sure how you can speak for another person and attach different meaning to the words they used. She was sick, and it caused harm to people trying to treat her. We don't call radioactive patients toxic. I don't disagree with the fact that she was a health hazard, but it is completely unnecessary to reduce her down to a "Toxic Woman." That's all she's remembered as, and it's sad. I think you both missed the point.
@@fioregiallo thank you omg I really couldnt be bothered to reply, ppl are so weird😭😭
I remember seeing this on live news when I was a kid. The press immediately started covering it up and by the next day there were no more updates, people talked about it for weeks. I've thought about it for years and even wondered if I dreamed the whole thing. Thanks for this video!
Me too!
Why would the media try to bury it?? They love whipping people up. That’s very suspicious to me!
@@WaitingForTheSubway I have no idea! I just remember watching the news the following days and there was the "mass hysteria" explanation and then nothing. I suspect they just didn't know and wanted to prevent the spread of "hysteria."
@@jcasillas78 Amazing how that works, isn't it? Smh lol
Now you know why they hide bigfoot
Back in the 70's my dad used to use DMSO because he had chronic terrible pain. He had post-polio syndrome. He had to inject it. It definitely has a fruity garlic smell, quite strong and kind of nauseating. When you said it smelled like that, I knew it had to be DMSO.
The one point that sticks out to me is the family denying she was using DMSO cream. I wish there were more resources or interviews with the family for why they think she was not using it. Her using the cream makes sense and it's not a slight against her for using a remedy like this.
The thing is that unless they lived with her at that time, there doesn’t seem like there’d be a certainty of what she was using. I doubt, even living with my parents still, if I could name the different lotion they might use for a set of dry hands in the winter. They would know better than anyone, but even those who could know best may not.
@@drakesmith471 Some other comments suggested the possibility that she received it unmarked from someone (another patient perhaps) or that it was labeled differently. For example I take a drug called Montelukast Sodium which most people haven't heard of, except that they probably have under it's brand name Singulair (asthma medication). I also take Cetirizine Hydrochloride aka Zyrtec (allergy medication). There's plenty of over the counter example as well like Paracetamol aka Tylenol or Ibuprofen aka Advil (and others).
@@drakesmith471 My recollection is she was living with family. She was in end-stage cancer after all.
@@Libbathegreat then that’s a very fair point then. If that’s the case, then yeah, their judgement is far fairer.
Paid off, possibly - big pharma has deep pockets & zero scruples when it comes to damage control.
I remember when this story was reported! it seemed to be straight out of the X-Files!!! I think Chris Carter the creator of the X-Files later used the concept of "toxic" blood in the series. The dismissal of verifiable physical symptoms as "mass hysteria" is also straight out of the Men in Black playbook.
"pLaYbOoK" dude, learn proper vernacular.
@@aodigital9421 u mad bro?
@@potatofuryy We're all mad here 🤪
@@aodigital9421 made sense to me. It's a pretty common expression. Is english not your first language?
@@andypeters3011 : "Netizen" seems to be his first language.
Great closing statements. Glad you recognized her as a human being and not just as a side show. Awesome video as always! Love when you drop new content.
I heard about this when it happened. I was in high school, and I was always curious about it. I had heard the 'mass delusion' explanation, and figured it was just that, but it did seem odd that such a thing would happen in a hospital of all places. I know mass delusion is something people are prone to, especially in stressful circumstances.... but of this specific kind just seemed very odd. They're treated thousands of people just like Ms. Ramirez and for them to imagine something that would cause a response unlike anything else they have ever experienced just seems weird. If they had believed she was infected with meningitis or some other scary contagious disease, sure, but there's really no such thing as "knock out gas" and they would know that.
Parasite eve irl be like
Also, everyone seems to forget that experienced ER staff have coping strategies in place due to the stuff they deal with on a daily basis they're not going to smell something odd on someone and then make up being sick to the point of convulsions and hospitalizations. They may feel nausea and experience vomiting if it's bad enough and need to get some fresh air, but that will most likely be it.
The Russians have a knockout gas called Kolokol-1. They used it to anesthetize an entire theater full of people that had been captured by Chechen militants. Unfortunately the antidote was not administered quickly enough to some of them.
I know one of the biggest detractors of this theory is that her family said she’d never even heard of DMSO nor used it. But what are the chances a friend suggested it and she decided to try it out of desperation from pains? I don’t think it’s an impossible theory just because her family said, or rather, didn’t know if she had known about it or not.
Except her family would have found out because they undoubtedly had to clean out her house and would have found it. I believe them over this guy at Livermore who never even examined her.
@@Libbathegreat I use many over the counter medicines in containers without any marking in them. This could be a case similar to that.
@@testacals Except this theory hinges on her having taken it in topical rather than pill form to account for the greasy substance on her skin. DMSO is sold OTT in a vaseline-like gel. You wouldn't likely take it out out of a labeled container and put it into an unlabeled one.
@@Libbathegreatno, but you could package and sell it in unmarked containers to begin with, if shes purchasing it under the table already, then what do some ignored regulations matter?
You are the first person who has covered this who actually explained the logic behind the most probable theory. Could’ve just been the people I watched before, but they were like 🤷♀️
The concerned humanity and sympatheic fellow-feeling that Joe exhibits in these videos... speaks well of his good character.
Keep doing what you're doing, Joe. 'Preciate it.
I've watched probably every single video made about this case. I've seen the DMSO suggestion before, but this was the clearest explanation so far! As an RN,the case was especially fascinating to me, because I could not come up with any scenario which made sense, or didn't beggar the imagination. That report made up by the two women was absolute garbage. ER staff aren't going to faint and/or seizure becase of a smell. Or anything else.
I was working there that night. I knew basically everyone in that ER, And you're right. They were not the types to faint or have "mass hysteria" or anything like that.
Honestly. ER personnel are exposed to nearly every terrible stench the human body can make on a regular basis, it comes with the territory.
@@ericf7063 source: trust me bro
@@ericf7063 that would require there to be a type of person to fall victim to psychological disorders.
The strongest women you know can end up in an abusive relationship unable to leave.
The best nurses can become burn out and develop GAD as a secondary consequence etc.
And it got nothing to do with how ‚strong‘ or capable you are.
Mental disorders aren’t your fault. And acting like someone is somehow weak for being afflicted by one… is unbecoming of the profession.
I am of the belief that there was a noxious gas leak (such as CO2) in that hospital and they merely swept it under the rug. The DMSO theory is brilliant but just seems exceedingly far-fetched.
im glad I got to watch this! I watched the buzzfeed unsolved video about this and I thought the mass hysteria explanation was total bs too. like these were experienced doctors and trauma nurses and there wasn't anything remotely gross or that disturbing initially about Gloria's case. thank you for breaking down the science!
I have little knowledge on pharmacology but i do know mustard gas derivatives are used sometimes in chemotherapy. It may be possible a combination of several different medications and chemicals (and poor oversight in treatment) used to treat her cancer interacted with each other (either before treatment or within her body) to create some toxic compound.
Yeah I immediately thought sulfur mustard when he mentioned the oily shein and chemical burns and the smell.
Sounds much more likely than the DMSO fairytale. Mistakes in dosages happen more often than hospitals like to admit.
I wouldn't say poor oversight in treatment, we don't know, especially if she was using home remedies on her own.
Respect to you Joe, for respecting her as a human being
Dmso is also used as a solvent for various chemicals. I used it the lab quite often. You have to be very careful because dmso is readily absorbed through the skin; and anything dissolved in it as well.
I once spilled dmso on my hand and within about 10min I had the taste of garlic in my mouth.
DSMO topical cremes were (are?) a particularly popular snake-oil 'medicine' in some Latino communities in the 90s, including in SoCal. I recall cases of people getting poisoned by all sorts of strange substances (eg. clothing dyes) because they had slathered themselves in the DSMO.
The chemical reaction chain Joe mentions is certainly possible (and seems likely at least part of the cause in this case), but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some other substance involved that she absorbed which made the effects worse. There are a lot of things you won't pick up with a mass spec, especially if you aren't looking specifically for it.
Did you have any signs of illness or toxicity or just the unpleasant taste of garlic?
@@heavnnnsent
No. It was pure dmso, and the volume I split was a about 100ml. I washed it off quickly, so I didn't absorb a large amount.
crazy scary....
@@heavnnnsent Why would he? DMSO is not toxic and is still used in medicine today. The whole point of the theory is that in very, very special circumstances it could be oxidized into something that is toxic
Thank you for recognizing this lady as a good human being. It is too often that a death is overlooked.
This is incredibly fascinating and a lot of the comments are super interesting. With a case like this it can be hard to remember that the subject of study was once a person, so the bit near the end about remembering the person who passed was really sweet. Heck even I got so invested into hearing all the theories that I started to forget the person at the center of all this. Then again this is the kind of stuff I love to learn about.
This is one of those stories that’s particularly fascinating to learn about because of how recent it is, there’s a ton of details about it online
This is one of my favourite medical stories. Also excited to be awake in Australia to see you upload 3 minutes ago - it’s 1am.
its 11:00 AM around here in Brasil!
Just woke up here in Wisconsin in the northern US
Alaska, USA
Minnesota, been awake all night and can't sleep. Came out at 9am for me, and caught it 45 minutes late.
11pm in Singapore 😊
Perfect pacing, minimal editing and good humour. Alongside it being a great telling of what happened, love it!
As a fan of mystery stories, I absolutely love this
Ever hear of Lydia Fairchild? Very cool mystery. A woman who was an only child somehow gave birth to her non-existent sister's child. Totally explainable without the "woowoo" but still a cool true mystery story.
Wow scoobie snacks for everyone here lol!!
Thank you for acknowledging & remembering the victim at the end. A life was lost and that should never get lost in the details.
I stopped by again (watched this the other day) to tell you how happy I am having found your channel (and that there is so much more content to yet unearth here). Your sprawling diversity of interests seems pretty unique on youtube and it's just perfect for me, for many of us, who are just curious people w/o perhaps the time to do the work you are doing to do a topic justice. Your dry humor is great, even in more "serious" videos-I laugh allowed in surprise almost always a couple of times. I almost never comment on TH-cam, but came here to say this.
I agree....love Joe.
As a chemist, DMSO is really cool because it can carry other chemicals with it seamlessly into your body.
Also, if you're near phosgene and you smell fresh cut grass but there isn't anyone near you mowing a lawn, look for the windsock and RUN.
WW1 very common gas attack method
@J K yeeesssss! So cool, and so terrible.
I'm gonna be so paranoid in summer 🤣🤣
Sooo nerve Agent
Right because every neighborhood has a windsock
She had a kind face. I'm sure her kindness made many other people's lives better. RIP.
I thought the same thing. RIP sweet lady
he face being "kind" says entirely nothing about who she was
Unfortunately for this bit of kindness, the top comment is misogyny
@@blacklightredlight2945 it's not even real, it's just something invented by hysterical women
Even horrible people smile sweetly when they're having a portrait photo taken. Let's just accept that none of us know anything about what kind of woman she was.
I knew what it was when you started describing the symptoms. My parents used to get DMSO to use on our horses when I was a kid. It was a smell you could taste, if that makes any sense.
makes perfect sense, thats why when you cover your nostrils when eating something gross you don't taste it as much.
This is absolutely and truly my favorite medical mystery case to this day! I love thinking about everything that could have caused this, and how this might change how we study and treat patients
IV METH BAGS FOR EVERYBODY!
My takeaway was don't mix chemo and degreaser 🤔
@@dr.bright3081 Dear " Doc ". Methamphetamine use is no joking matter. It has destroyed countless lives.
@@soulife8383 Exactly. And about time this information got included to be taught about in elementary schools. Just like "don't drink and drive" is explained on why that is a bad combination and not socially accepted despite that some adults do it. Basically it should be "common sense" knowledge that one should have.
I hade choosen a favorite previously, there are many, but now I'll too pick this one as a favorite.
"filled with a vacuum" is the best oxymoron
Galaxy brain comment 👌
So the real mystery is why Gloria wasn't given enough pain relief to the point where she had to slather DMSO all over her body?
The blood tests showed that she had Tylenol and codeine in her blood, so she was already taking a weak opioid with Tylenol, level 2 of the WHO analgesic ladder, surely doctors could've given her tramadol or something.
Often people of color are not prescribed the amount of pain killers as white patients. So my guess is racism probably didn’t help. People of color also tend to use more home remedies as a result of this inequity. This story is more sad then scary honestly.
@@Veknr44 Does ignoring sociocultural context makes you feel better?
@@Veknr44 If the subject of race makes you uncomfortable that’s on you.
@@calebn5330 This is a story from California, and she’s Hispanic. There’s not exactly a shortage of them around that area. Even looking at the names of the doctors in this story you can see a lot of Spanish names popping up. Frankly, I think it was probably just her prerogative to trust a home remedy that would keep her somewhat lucid instead of being doped up out of her mind. She had late stage cervical cancer, after all.
@@seantolson6223 Sure dude zero racism in California…
Mysteries of the Human Body is a great series that was a very interesting and fun watch. Keep up the great work Joe and team!
I worked in wastewater treatment plants for years and hydrogen sulfide is something we operators are acutely aware of.
Right on , I've been gassed by H2s pretty bad working in the oilfield
The New York City department of environmental protection has several water pollution control plants and sewage treatment plants and I am sure many people get all kinds of toxic stuff in their system from working at these I wonder if they become immune to it because of their frequent exposure?
The issue with hydrogen sulfide is, that you will only briefly smell it. After initial exposition the nerves in your nose are basically rendered useless and you don't smell a thing.
@@wotzefakiunot necessarily, if it remains at a low concentration like 10ppm (parts per million) it will continue to stink. However around 100ppm and above you will no longer be able to smell it.
I was treated with DMSO for one of my conditions, and it was nightmarish. No exaggeration. One of the worst things I’ve ever been through.
By a licensed medical practitioner? for what?
I used to have it instilled in my bladder for interstitial cystitis. 30 years ago it was a standard treatment. I know I smelled garlicky after a treatment because my friends would mention it.
Holy shit this was such a good episode! What an insane mystery!
Except everything past the the moment where he pulled the "vapour point" out of his. There is no such thing . There is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature. I have not the slightest idea where did he take 148 celsius from. And the "explanation" that using vacuumed vials made it evaporate? Joe are you kidding me? You do realize that they are hermetically sealed with one way valve?
The vapor pressure of DMS is 65 Pa and is sufficiently large to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C.
Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K)
Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes)
Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
I worked in a lab for a while growing cell cultures, and we used DMSO all the time. We worked with pretty small amounts and wore gloves anyway to avoid contamination, but my supervisor said it was pretty harmless. I worked with a lot of stuff that was *not* pretty harmless, so I'm guessing by comparison it didn't register.
I’m a biotechnology product salesperson, and I’ve sold DMSO so many times to my customers that do cell culture, and sometimes had to deliver DMSO myself. I knew there are some hazards to it, but to this extent, wow!
@@UltraHanisah Yeah there were a few things where he was like "If you get this on your skin you have cancer now," so I'm guessing DMSO landed firmly in "this is fine" territory.
@@cceres Do you guys still use EtBr in your lab?
yeah, it’s pretty interesting stuff to learn as a fellow lab tech. i had to freeze some cells before and i know DMSO is used for cell freezing and it’s cytotoxic, but that’s about it. makes me kinda afraid of using DMSO now lol
Pretty specific combination of circumstances to make it harmful! High levels of DMSO *plus* high-flow oxygen *plus* exposure to vacuum!
This has been a great mystery for a long time. Glad you're covering it, Joe!
Your delivery at 11:00 was fantastic. And the smile afterward, the look down, the smile again 🤣
Talking h2s gas, I work in the oil industry as a power engineer in Canada. We wear h2s monitors on site 12 hours a day as soon as you hit the main buildings. That stuff is so dangerous we have to take a yearly course on it, and the instructor without fail every year says “if you smell it working here, it’s probably already too late.” Pretty scary stuff.
If the course takes a year, how you get any work done??? 🤔 😆😆😆
@@myview5840 "yearly" means every year, not throughout the year.
@@Empty.064 no you don't say
@@myview5840 so uncouchered >:o(
Plumber here, hoisted a co worker out of a ventilated sewer with a man lift cable after he collapsed. It happened immediately after he disturbed a sludge pile in the manhole. He said "ohh my God that reeeks" and then kinda slumped over and was non responsive. Rapid motor lift and he was awake a few minutes later throwing up and nauseous. His h2s monitor started screaming immediately after he slumped
I heard a story years ago about a worker at the gold mine who goes to the doctor, very worried. he said a snake bit him, and immediately after biting him, the snake writhed and died. Doctor took samples, and found he had very high levels of cyanide in his blood, from working decades on a mine in the cyanide plant where gold was dissolved. He was fine, snake died from cyanide poisoning. Oh yes, also a lethal snake bite normally, but he was fine, aside from a headache.
How the heck does that work?
@@aidanhammans9337 Small doses over a very long time, and a guy who would pass any fitness test with no issues.
Knew one guy who, every year when asked his age, would reply "60", even though he had been doing it for a decade or more. He worked as an assistant for a mechanic, and we listened to his stories about his father coming back from "the Great War" when he was a child. And then about him working when the next war came around. At that time this put him at around 80, but he did not want to go on pension, and as he did not have a birth certificate, or any other paperwork, a common thing, he just kept on doing it.
I wonder if he ended up having cancer or other illnesses as he aged....
@@aidanhammans9337 rasputin did the same thing ironically with the poison his killers tried to use on him tiny doses of poison smaller then the amount that would kill you obviously will let you build up a natural immunity like drinking tons of alcohol or smoking a carton a day to get the same effects they used to give you when you first started
This is a useful tale about understanding the difference in danger potential of natural vs. artificial toxins. Cyanide is, for example, a metabolic product of eating certain fruit kernels, and our body actually has the capacity to metabolize small quantities of it spread over a timespan with ease. After all, the poison is a highly concentrated form, basically total overkill.
This would be evolutionary. We were exposed to those very natural toxins over a long time of history and thus adapted to a degree. We could claim the same about ethanol. I mean, geez, people are drinking a volatile harsh solvent! And it's even legal to sell it. ... Because we have developed ways to metabolize it.
Same with mercury. The dose makes the poison. Or body detoxes all the time, according to its abilities, which will vary based on our level of health. Some substance known to accumulate in the body might only do so if the dosage-to-detox ratio is unfavorable. Chelation agents for example serve to get rid of certain unwanted particulates.
Highly dosed chlorella is used after removal of amalgam tooth fillings to support detox of the mercury.
Such a strange mystery even after all these years. Thank you for covering it respectfully regarding those involved in the actual events.
14:26 A GAME THEORY!
Yeshy
THANKS FOR WATCHING
This was a classic Joe episode. The type of original material that leaves you on the edge of your seat trying to form a conclusion to some mystery. Great stuff, unfortunately I’m watching before clocking in at my hospital 😅
If she was covered in DMSO, whatever else was on her skin would have gotten into her bloodstream, as well as anyone else who touched her. The gel for defibrillator pads? The alcohol wipe for the blood draw? What if they used hibicleanse (sp?)? DMSO turns whatever is on your skin into something in your blood.
Such a nifty chemical. I used it as a hangover cure back in the day because it gets into your system so much faster than oral medication. Gives you garlic breath though.
My neighbors uncle worked for Squibb Pharmaceutical and he use to bring my neighbor and me small bottles of DMSO for use on our sore muscles. It worked great except it gave a odd taste in your mouth and an oily patch where it was applied. We only used a very small amount on a small area and it worked. It sounded like the woman in your story was using way to much of the stuff.
This could also explain why they couldn't save her, the nerve gas had dispersed throughout her bloodstream
Why did she produce nerve gas? She ate doritos flavored mountain dew.
And then, like Puma she was able to clear the Savanah...
Drank
@@jesse8250 what if it was frozen into a popsicle? 😅
@@josephdavis9204 touché
Waka waka waka
We used DMSO often in the veterinary office on horses and yes, if I came in contact with it, I would immediately taste garlic and become nauseous
I remember this incident. I haven't thought about it in years. I was on a Haz Mat team for a fire dept. so that's why it attracted our attention. It's unfortunate what happened to this woman. Have you ever done a video on spontaneous human combustion? I've always wondered if there is any validity to that or if it's an urban myth. I read a few articles about it years ago but not anything I felt confirmed it. Thanks for the video.
I've heard 'spontaneous human combustion' is usually caused by a mix of oxygen tanks, a smoker, and a person who's obese. Apparently fat burns like wax, so the remains turn into ash. Which is why often times hands and feet remain, because there's little to no fat to burn.
wait is Fire Force based on a real story?
Spontaneous human combustion reports fell off as regulations around flammability of clothing and furniture were put in place. It seems most instances were people fell asleep or died while smoking and had a localized fire fed by the burning of their own body.
Man who drank moonshine in early 1900 and exploded in the morning? There's Wikipedia article of it too
I know some have researched spontaneous combustion. There is a specific list of things that seem to be risk factors though no one knows why.
I remember this story when it first broke. I was an ER nurse at the time and was fascinated. A few months before, the er i was at had a patient brought in by ambulance who looked AWFUL. I was supposed to go off shift, but stayed to help land him cause he looked so bad. We cut off his clothes, was getting him on monitor, putting in an IV... We were shocked when he started swearing at us after looking him for the IV. We all thought he was comatose.
Long story short, everyone who had been in that er room got horrifically sick with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. At least two people were hospitalized. I had showered immediately afterwards(again, i was going off shift) and flew across the country to go to a wedding. I had the most mild case... but afterwards, had chronic diarrhea, arthritis, and other health problems that lasted for 8 years; until i finally went on an antibiotic cocktail while doing an extended fast.
There's a lot of weird stuff out there
Wow makes me wonder what in the heck did he bring into that E. R.?
Did you find out what caused people to get sick?
@@sari9645 patient was diagnosed with "Dysentery", basically some bacterial diarrhea. No idea which type. I had a CT of my neck recently and they found evidence of reactive arthritis/Reiter's Syndrome, so it was likely either Shigella or Salmonella
Fun fact about DMSO- it's used in the horse world to reduce swelling and to help transport other topical medications past the skin barrier. It definitely smalls super garlicky!
This is exactly why I decided not to try it for my chronic pain. I didn't want anything else that might be on my skin to get absorbed into my body.
Interesting. Just one question. How do I get to this horse world?
@@lisak7247 : And _that_ also happens to be the reason why hyposprays are almost completely unknown outside of Star Trek- they drag along anything on the skin.
@@absalomdraconis 🖖🖖🖖
I actually have two containers of DMSO in my tack box right now. I'm going to be looking at it differently from now on.
And yes, the garlic smell is awful. I accidentally got some DMSO on my hands while putting it on my horse's leg, and my sweat smelled like garlic for days. Ew.
The "pressure changes everything" got me laughing so hard. Thank you!
One of your best episodes Joe, and I love that it has a quite plausible explanation too
Except that everything past "vapour point" is nonsense. There is no such thing, there is vapor pressure and it is a measure of pressure not temperature.
DMS is volatile enough to produce a lethal concentration in air by evaporation at 20 °C.
Melting point: −32 °C (−26 °F; 241 K)
Boiling point: 188 °C (370 °F; 461 K) (decomposes)
Flash point: 83 °C; 182 °F; 356 K (temperature at which a liquid gives off vapours capable of forming an ignitable vapour/air mixture)
Thanks for covering this. Also, kudos to the investigator for really knowing his material. That’s incredible attention to detail.
i have been trying to look for good documentaries to watch especially bc I'm a history nerd, so I'm super glad you shared Curiosity with us! it's insane to think that it's less than $20 for the entire year!! I'm so grateful that you gave us the opportunity to sign up with a discount, thanks Joe! :D
also, I remember hearing about the Toxic Lady a while back when learning about other unsolved mysteries. it's so sad that she went through all that and unintentionally hurt a lot of other people who wanted to help. hopefully we have more of an understanding of how these things work so something like this doesn't happen again.
Another way that the reaction could possibly happen would be when she was defibrillated. The oily substance on her chest would have been heated by the paddles (there is enough energy to burn skin if not done properly. It would also get spread through the air
I thought this could be a possibility too, most people who you’d work a cardiac arrest on are pretty wet and sweaty but the ER staff specifically say she had a odd shine, maybe the paddles electrified the chemical on her skin and released it into the air.
@@trevor0245 But the ER people didn't get sick. If it was released into the air, shouldn't they have gotten sick?
I remember when there was a big DMSO craze. Some major league baseball pitcher was using it on his elbow, then it exploded into every sport, and of course it became a home remedy for everything. My uncle was using it for something. The odd thing was that as soon as it touched your skin, you got a strong taste of garlic in the mouth. Anyway, it turns out to have some serious side effects, was less effective than other stuff (like aspirin), and people quit using it.
That taste is actually it being transported through your bloodstream to your tongue! DMSO penetrates the skin readily and ends up circulating in the blood, where it then leaks out through the capillaries in your tongue so you can taste it. Interestingly saccharin will also do this, which is why after drinking certain diet sodas the aftertaste can linger in your mouth for quite a long time after finishing the drink. It's not actually in your mouth, it's in your bloodstream.
Much like many other ridiculous home remedies, ends up being toxic and/or doing nothing/ being less effective than other more safe treatments.
Murica
@@rdizzy1 just like vaccines
@@Ligma-Balls-69 inviting other cultures to live in peace is very American, yes.
I’m so glad I found this, I love these types of channels
On a note about DMSO, it is an excellent transdermal carrier agent. Which is a danger of handling DMSO. It can dissolve some chemicals and carry them across the lipid layer of skin tissue. In some studies I've read they used DMSO as a drug administration method.
It should be noted that it is an effective transfer agent for many other organic materials one of which happens to be latex. This seems noteworthy as this is also what standard medical gloves are made of. Since the medical team had no idea that it was present they wouldn't have known to use suitable alternative PPE. As such there is a possibility that something might actually have got transferred through contact even through their protective gloves. Seems like it would potentially only take a few touching her then through touching equipment and such transferred potentially contaminated DMSO to other staff that way.
I really enjoyed the video, but want to point something about out the brief comment @7:45 about how those affected weren't "shrinking violets" but were experienced ER doctors and nurses who routinely dealt with critical ill patients (and weird smells). You don't need to look any further than police officers who develop immediate respiratory distress or faint when they have physical contact with suspected fentanyl to realize that anyone can develop a psychogenic reaction in the right circumstances. (Brief skin contact with fentanyl is completely, 100% safe and does not cause physical illness)
She'll probably be remembered longer and better than most of us.
I remember when this happened. I read a short story in the news paper and never heard what happened. So glad to finally learn the story
I can remember where I was when this story broke. I was at work where we always had on KYW News radio out of Philly. Thanks Joe for the trip down memory lane with a truly bizarre story!
personally, i think the defibrillator might have played a role in turning it into a toxic gas so fast
Ohhh that's true!
No there's literally zero mechanism for that to happen, respectfully intended
Elaborate
@@michaelcantu6071 electricity is hot, it heats up the oily layer on the skin and fills the room with gases
This is the most comprehensive breakdown of what happened. Thank you
Your video got me to like, and your compassion for the original victim compelled me to subscribe. Great content. From, an Aussie that watches TH-cam when I should be sleeping.
A perfect "Joe" episode. Thank You.
P.S. It was 'Answers with Joe' who got me hopelessly addicted to YT 9 years ago.
In 2007, a friend gave me DMSO to use on a couple of warts. I used it and was shocked to find that I could *taste* it within 5 minutes or so. I guess it goes through your skin pretty easily. That scared me enough that I never used it again.
It's not particularly dangerous by itself, but if you ever use it again you should absolutely be careful to clean the area that you'll be applying it to thoroughly, and then apply a waterproof bandage to keep anything undesired from contacting the area- it essentially makes the skin "leaky", which can be useful for administering medications, and dangerous if anything _unintended_ comes in contact with the area.
The only difference between the DMSO and anything else you absorb through your skin (lotion, sunscreen, etc) is that you happen to be able to detect the DMSO in your taste buds. It all ends up throughout your body.
@@apburner1 Absorption of the fats in substances through the skin doesn't have to mean anything enters the bloodstream.
Dmso is an incredible chemical, it has transdermal properties and must be handled with extreme care
Dimethyl sulphate isn't a "nerve gas", not even remotely. Nerve gasses work on the nervous system, as the name implies, more specifically they prevent the break down of acetyl choline which causes muscle paralysis. Dimethyl sulphate is an alkylating agent, and was originally used as a war gas though, just not as a nerve agent.