04.01.14
Local suicide attempt by castor seeds?
What’s wrong with this picture? Read the post to find out. The now bog standard American response to powdered castor seeds.
From KPCC public radio in Pasadena:
Three people including a Los Angeles police officer and a firefighter were hospitalized after being exposed to what was thought to be a dangerous substance.
Police Lt. Sabrina Kuhn tells City News Service that firefighters responded late Monday to a call of a possible overdose in Van Nuys.
They found a 23-year-old man had injected himself with a mix of an unknown white power and crushed castor beans …
A HazMat team determined that the crushed castor beans were not harmful, but admitted the firefighter and officer to a hospital as a precautionary measure. Ten residences in the area were briefly evacuated.
Police mentioned the unnamed individual may be subject to mental evaluation upon release from the hospital.
One science paper on an extremely rare event, abstract at the National Institutes of Health online library, on a suicide by injection of castor in 2009:
A case report is presented of a 49-year-old man who committed suicide by intravenous and subcutaneous injection of a castor bean extract. He was brought to the emergency department 24 h after injecting himself. On admission, the patient was conscious and he presented with a history of nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, dyspnoea, vertigo and muscular pain. Despite symptomatic and supportive intensive care, the man died 9 h after admission due to multiorgan failure …
Based on the clinical symptoms and the results of the toxicological analysis, we concluded that death was caused by intoxication with plant toxins originated from R. communis L.
A fascinating 2011 scientific review, available for free, entitled Ricinus communis: Intoxications in human and veterinary medicine, is also here.
Excerpted:
A very recent review on the American Association of Poison Control Centers reports 45 fatalities out of more than 2 million plant poisonings between 1983 and 2009, of these, only one fatal case was attributed to Ricinus communis, while the majority (16 deaths) was caused by Datura and Cicuta species. A review by the Swiss Toxicology Information Centre mentioned 130 serious cases including five fatal plant poisonings between 1966 and 1994, among them three non-fatal cases related to Ricinus communis. These reviews of local plant poisonings support the opinion that intoxications with Ricinus communis usually do not belong to the most common or serious poisonings occurring accidentally in humans.
The seeds of Ricinus communis have a long history as medical remedy; it is therefore not surprising to find cases linked with adverse reaction to them: A Korean woman who had eaten five castor seeds in order to treat constipation was admitted to hospital with severe nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and initially near hypothermia; in this case ricin was detected in urine samples, symptoms were treated (fluids, charcoal) and she was discharged after 2 days. Similar cases have been reported from Brazil and Croatia …
In cases of intended uptake of ricin different reports describe suicides by injection of a self-made seed extract in Poland, Belgium and the US (Table 1). A fatal suicide took place in Poland, here a man subcutaneously injected himself with a Ricinus communis seed extract and was admitted 36 h later to the clinic with nausea, dizziness, pain and severe weakness. He deteriorated with haemorrhagic diathesis and multi-organ failure and died after asystolic arrest 18 h later …
Overall-among all plant poisonings reported-human cases of ricin poisoning are rare. With modern supportive care the fatality rate is low, except in suicide cases where a ricin-containing extract is injected, reflecting the higher toxicity after parenteral application.
Rough as well as precise evidence accumulated worldwide on death by castor seed consumption as well as injection over the course of many years yielded the following:
876 accidental cases (including one by injection), of which 13 died — or 1.5 percent. Paradoxically, the one injection case did not result in a fatality.
11 intended poisoning cases, 5 of which were oral and 6 by injection. Of these, none died in the oral sample while 5 expired after injection — or 45.5 percent of the whole.