At the BBC, a story of a woman who poisoned her husband by putting eyedrops in his water. Who knew this was a such a readily available poison?:
She was detained when a toxicology test discovered a chemical called tetrahydrozoline in his body.
The substance is found in over-the-counter eyedrops and nasal sprays that are available without a prescription....
Tetrahydrozoline can cause seizures, stop breathing and induce comas, according to the US National Library of Medicine.
Even a few drops of the drug, which is intended to reduce redness, can cause "serious adverse events".
Somewhat blackly amusing, though, is this part of the report:
Prosecutors say they are now reviewing a 2016 incident, in which she shot her husband in the head with a crossbow as he slept.
Police determined that that shooting was "accidental", according to a police report obtained by the Charlotte Observer.
Investigators found Mrs Clayton at home "crying and upset" after the crossbow incident, according to the report.
Update: OK so, obviously, eyedrop poisoning has been a "thing" for some time - just that I have missed it. From
Wired in 2013:
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Eye-drop poisoning is more routine you might think. Remember the Ohio man arrested last year
for sending his father to the hospital by putting two bottles of Visine
into his milk? The Pennsylvania woman who'd been sneaking Visine into
her boyfriend's drinking water for three years? (The poor man suffered all that time
with nausea, breathing and blood pressure problems). Oh, and let's not
forget the Wyoming teenager who was angry with her step-mother; the girl
just pleaded no contest to aggravated assault charges this Friday.
Risky encounters with eyedrops
have turned up on poison center roundups; the myth-busting website Snopes.com has
tallied up
even more. And those are lists of deliberate eye drop attacks. Let's
not forget the hazards posed by accidental poisonings; the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration has
issued a warning to parents about leaving eye drops containers around where they might be found by children.
Snopes
took up the question to debunk an apparent belief that sneaking eye
drops into a drink would basically induce a hilarious case of diarrhea –
a scenario portrayed in a prank scene in the 2005 movie
Wedding Crashers.
Did I mention that Snopes specializes in myth busting? The website
labeled the diarrhea scenario false and more. It went on to issue this
warning: "Ingestion of such a concoction is downright dangerous making
this 'harmless' form of retaliation fraught with hazard."....
The record tells us that tetrahydrozoline while poisonous is not a
top-of-line-lethal substance. According to the safety sheet, acute oral
toxicity in lab mice stands at an LD50 of 345 mg/kg. (LD50 stands for
lethal dose 50 percent, meaning the amount of a toxic substance that
will kill half of a test population). For comparison, the LD50 of
potassium cyanide in mice is 5 mg/kg. And that difference means that
while people do end up the hospital, they tend to survive the stay. This
is good news for victims and also for perpetrators, as so many of them
end up arrested thanks in part to the very characteristic symptoms of
eye drop poisoning.
That's weirdly irresponsible of
Wedding Crashers, isn't it? (I've never seen it.)
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