Weekly Web Review in Toxicology #3

Was Pablo Neruda poisoned: The journal Nature posted an article asking whether, at this late date, science is capable of determining whether the Nobel-prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned. Neruda’s death in 1973 occurred less than 2 weeks after a coup d’etat in Chile deposed Socialist President Salvador Allende and installed a right-wing dictatorship led by Augusto Pinohcet. The death was officially attributed to prostate cancer at the time, but recent allegations have raised the possibility of poisoning. This week, Neruda’s remains were exhumed for testing. Nature’s correspondent, Michele Catanzaro, points out that after the passage of so much time, there are many potential causes of false negative and false positive toxicology results. Another on-going, high-profile forensic toxicology investigation is looking into whether the President of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, was killed with radioactive polonium in 2004.   Are Adderall and Ritalin contributing to increased rates of post-traumatic stress order in the military? In an intriguing but speculative op-ed piece in the New York Times, psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman notes that in the last decade, the number of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan diagnosed with PTSD has skyrocketed, as has the number of prescriptions for Adderall and Ritalin written for active-duty service members. As he points out: Stimulants are widely used in the civilian populati...
Source: The Poison Review - Category: Toxicology Authors: Tags: Medical dashiell hammett opera pablo neruda poison toxicology Source Type: news