Small  doses

OPs leave you speechless
Doctors at the University of Tennessee have discovered a new type of life-threatening organophosphate poisoning which causes brief bilateral vocal cord paralysis, that includes loss of voice and airway obstruction. They have reported on a two-year-old boy who had eaten a substance later found to be contaminated with insecticide. Within minutes, fever and drowsiness developed, followed by progressive respiratory distress and stridor (a high-pitched respiratory sound), although he suffered no generalised weakness. The child's condition progressed to complete airway obstruction, that required  intubation (the insertion of a tube directly into the trachea [wind pipe]). The paralysis lasted for two days before the boy returned completely to normal.
    It is thought he ate boric acid located under a kitchen sink, that had possibly been over-sprayed by a professional pest control operator with unspecified OP and synthetic pyrethroid insecticide.

Brief bilateral vocal cord paralysis after insecticide poisoning: a new variant of toxicity syndrome, Archives of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Vol. 123, 1997, 93-96.

Millennium bomb
An unnamed multinational chemical company has warned that the 'millennium bomb' could cause a massive chemical catastrophe. "We would be amazed if there is not a major chemical disaster somewhere caused by the year 2000 problems with embedded software," the company is quoted as saying in a new report by the year-2000 analysts PA Consulting.

Chemistry & Industry, 2 February 1998.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 39, March 1998, page 21 ]