It fell upon the third part of the river, and upon the fountains of water; … and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
—Rev. 8:10, 11
4419 Child-Proof Containers
Each year in the U. S., more than 400 children under the age of 5 accidentally poison themselves to death by opening things and swallowing whatever they happen to find inside. This represents the most common non-surgical emergency among U. S. children under five. To reduce this figure, the FDA is seeking standards for packaging laws which require that “safety closures” be installed on all potentially hazardous drugs and household products.
The closures must be tested by at least 200 children between 3½ and 4 years, 3 months. Each child is given five minutes to open a container; an observer then demonstrates how it’s done and tells the child he may try to get the top off with his teeth. A safety package has passed the test if, after another five minutes, 80% of all children tested still fail to get it open.
To insure that a child-resistant container is not too complicated for adults to use, the FDA also requires that new packaging be tested by adults between 18 and 45: 95% of them should ultimately be successful in opening the safety package.
4420 Cobalt Poison And Balm
A cobalt bomb is basically an atomic bomb stuffed with powerful radioactive cobalt. When the bomb explodes, the cobalt is dispersed over a wide area. The cobalt does not increase the explosive power of the bomb, but settles over the area as terrible fall-out. It descends to poison food supplies, water, and the lungs, eyes, and pores of animals and people.
But cobalt can also be put in radioactive cylinders and used to save lives. The radiation emitted from cobalt can be more powerful than radium and can be used to “burn” away cancers. Cobalt radiation treatments have been given to many cancer victims.
4421 Nerve Gas Drop
On March 13, 1967 a jet plane flown by an Air Force pilot released 320 gallons of “nerve gas” that had been developed by the United States.
A sudden shift in winds caused perhaps less than 5% of the released load to fall accidentally 20 to 30 miles from the planned clear target. This small percentage of nerve gas settled on thousands of grazing sheep killing almost instantly 6400 of these sheeps.
4422 Picking 50 Bushels Out Of 50,000
In April 1975, in the Mississippi River town of Burlington, Iowa, six women began sorting through an estimated 7.5 billion soybeans to pick out the bad ones. In the 50,000 bushels of beans were 50 bushels that had been sprayed with fungicide harmful to humans. The treated beans were to have been used as seed, but they were inadvertently mixed into a bargeload of regular soybeans. Thus the women are looking for one bad bean in every thousand, the bad beans having a green coating on them. At $5.80 a bushel, those being checked are worth about $290,000.
4423 Disaster (Almost) On The Roads
A Mankato, Minn., waste-oil dealer discovered that, without his permission, a trucker had been transporting fuel in his tanks to Iowa, where it was to have been sprayed on the state’s gravel roads to keep down the dust. Trouble was that some of the fuel, a solvent, was heavily contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a class of highly toxic chemicals that have been implicated in birth defects and nervous disorders.
Environmental officials were notified; they located the contaminated solvent in Cedar Falls and Fort Dodge, Iowa, before it had been used. Had the solvent been sprayed on Iowa’s roads, it could have found its way into animals, food and water supplies.
The result, said officials, would have been an ecological catastrophe that could have endangered the health—and perhaps lives—of thousands of Iowans.
—Time
4424 Poisoned Highway
When the rear trailer of a freight truck became unhitched on an uninhabited desert stretch of highway near Blythe, California, fifty cartons of liquid Parathion, a deadly insecticide, were spilled. A fifty-mile section of the main Los Angeles-to-Phoenix highway was closed, and there was a chance the roadbed and its shoulders would have to be removed.
One of the most powerful insecticides made, Parathion can be fatal to humans if it is eaten, breathed, or absorbed through the skin in sufficient amounts.
4425 She Poisoned 5 Husbands
Oklahoma City, Okla. (AP)—Nannie Doss, self-made widow who fed rat poison to four of her five husbands, 60-year-old, jovial, gum-chewing widow died at University Hospital which she entered May 20 after becoming ill at the state penitentiary at McAlester.
She was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of her fifth husband, Samuel L. Doss. But in addition to him, she also admitted feeding lethal doses of poison to three more husbands.
Motive for the slayings, the state claimed, was money from insurance policies.
Mrs. Doss said—at 50 years of age, she was planning a sixth marriage when she was arrested for Doss’ murder.
HUSBAND NO. 1, Charles Braggs, was the lone survivor. He married Nannie in Blue Mountain, Ala., and divorced her when he said he thought the food he was eating didn’t “taste right.”
HUSBAND NO. 2, Frank Harrelson, Jacksonville, Ala., was poisoned simply because Nannie said she heard he made arrangements to leave her and he also “ran around.” She used rat poison in his corn liquor.
HUSBAND NO. 3, Harley Lanning, was obtained in Lexington, N. C., and died afterwards. Nannie said she married him while still in “deep mourning” for Harrelson. Later she wanted to be through with romance because “the Lord had taken two of my husbands away.”
HUSBAND NO. 4, Richard Louis Morton, Emporia, Kan., was the result of a mail-order courtship. He died suddenly, few months after he refused to let her visit relatives in North Carolina.
HUSBAND NO. 5, Doss, was dying at Tulsa when Nannie was corresponding with prospective Husband No. 6, James H. Keel, Goldsboro, N. C., through a lonely- hearts’ club.
Keel said after learning Nannie had been charged with Doss’ slaying, “I’m sure mighty proud that she didn’t come to my part of the country.”
She escaped the electric chair because Judge Elmer Adams of Tulsa said it would be a “poor precedent” to make her the first woman sentenced to death in Oklahoma.
4426 Poison In Saltshaker
When Mrs. Mae Edwards died suddenly, her daughter, Bobbie Denson of Chicago cleaned out her apartment and inadvertently passed along to her neighbours the apparent cause of her mother’s death—a saltshaker full of poison. Found in the apartment was a glass jar full of sodium nitrate, a chemical which can kill in 30 minutes if consumed in sufficient quantities.
But a yellow-and-white plastic saltshaker had already been given to a friend who took it to the rooming house of Jeannette Hoy across the street. On March 2 Mrs. Hoy prepared chicken and potatoes for herself, and used the saltshaker. She died a short time later. On March 10 three elderly men suffered from symptoms of sodium nitrate poisoning after eating oatmeal. One of them died before reaching hospital, and the other two were placed under intensive care. They, too, had used the saltshaker.
—Selected
See also: Evil Imagination.