This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on ISI (3)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related letter  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

A Dark Wood Revisited

Alan D. Woolf, MD, MPH

JAMA. 1998;279:1215-1216.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Dante Alighieri begins his masterwork poem,The Divine Comedy,¹ by recounting how he came to embark on his journey through the Inferno: "In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the straight path." In this issue of JAMA, O'Brien and colleagues² take us to the dark wood of a public health disaster: the contamination of a medication, acetaminophen, with a toxic chemical, diethylene glycol (DEG), which occurred in Haiti in 1995 and 1996. Composed of 2 ethylene glycol residues joined by an ether bond, DEG has many industrial uses as a humectant, plasticizer, antifreeze, and solvent. In the confiscated medicines tested in Port-au-Prince, the median DEG concentration was 14.4%; a trace-back investigation revealed formulation of the syrups using glycerin of Chinese origin that was contaminated with 24% DEG. The somber results: at least . . . [Full Text of this Article]

From the Program of Clinical Toxicology in the Division of General Pediatrics, Department of Medicine, Children's Hospital, the Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Poison Control System, Boston.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati     What's this?

RELATED LETTER

Haitian Diethylene Glycol Disaster and Dante's Darkwood
Laurence J. Purdy and Alan Woolf
JAMA. 1998;280(11):965.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED ARTICLE

Epidemic of Pediatric Deaths From Acute Renal Failure Caused by Diethylene Glycol Poisoning
Katherine L. O'Brien, Joel D. Selanikio, Charleine Hecdivert, Marie-Florence Placide, Micheline Louis, Dana B. Barr, John R. Barr, C. James Hospedales, Merle J. Lewis, Benjamin Schwartz, Rossanne M. Philen, Suzelle St. Victor, Javier Espindola, Larry L. Needham, Karl Denerville, and for the Acute Renal Failure Investigation Team
JAMA. 1998;279(15):1175-1180.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Once again, children are the main victims of fake drugs
Bonati
Arch. Dis. Child. 2009;94:468-468.
FULL TEXT  

Toxic Alcohol Ingestions: Clinical Features, Diagnosis, and Management
Kraut and Kurtz
CJASN 2008;3:208-225.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Haitian Diethylene Glycol Disaster and Dante's Darkwood
Purdy and Woolf
JAMA 1998;280:965-965.
FULL TEXT  

DEG-Contaminated Acetaminophen Leads to Acute Renal Failure and Death in Children
JWatch General 1998;1998:4-4.
FULL TEXT