[DYSPHAGIA] blue dye causing deaths?

[bheint@execpc.com (Bonnie Heintskill)]

This is from another list. Intersting

http://news.excite.com/news/r/001004/17/science-health-dye-dc


  Food Dye Implicated in U.S. Patient Deaths



                            Updated 5:05 PM ET October 4, 2000

  BOSTON (Reuters) - A widely-used blue food dye may have
  contributed to the deaths of three critically ill patients after it was
  used to color the liquid food pumped into their stomachs,
  according to a report in Thursday's New England Journal of
  Medicine.

  The three had eaten food with FD&C blue dye No. 1 and their
  skin and blood turned a bluish-green hours before they died, Dr.
  James Maloney of the Medical College of Wisconsin told Reuters.

  A report on two of three cases originated in Denver and they are
  reported in the Journal. The third case will be presented at a
  conference in January.

  The dye, made from coal tar, is routinely added to the liquid to
  help doctors see if any of the food is escaping from the stomach
  and being inhaled. In healthy people, the dye never leaves the
  digestive tract.

  But these cases involved patients who had digestive track tissues
  being destroyed by sepsis, an infectious condition.

  Maloney and his colleagues said the damage apparently allowed
  the dye to get into the bloodstream, causing a deadly drop in blood
  pressure and an increase in acid levels in the body.

  One patient was a 54-year-old woman with heart failure. In 1995,
  two days after her food was colored with the dye, her skin and
  blood turned green and she died.

  The other victim described in the Journal was a one-year-old boy
  with sepsis who died in 1998 of the same cause on the day his
  skin, blood and urine turned blue.

  "Although both patients had serious underlying illnesses, their
  condition was improving before they received the dye and turned
  color," the researchers said.

  The third case involved an elderly woman from Wisconsin.

  Maloney said there have been other instances, none of them fatal,
  where seriously-ill recipients of the dye have turned color, but the
  incidents have been sporadic.

  The researcher said the dye is not dangerous to the vast majority
  of people. Because it is only in seriously ill patients that it might
  be a remote threat, as a precaution, Maloney said "we're trying to
  convince people not to use it in any hospitalized patients."

  The dye, manufactured by a variety of companies, was approved
  in the 1960s by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which
  performed other safety tests early in the 1980s. Those experiments
  showed that the dye was safe and the body didn't absorb it. But
  those tests were performed on healthy animals, the Maloney team
  noted.



bheint@execpc.com



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