Mercury poisoning caused by a homeopathic drug]

We report an infant with diaper dermatitis and mild respiratory and enteral infections, treated with a homeopathic mercurial medicine: Mercurius 6a (cinnabar dilute 1 x 10(6)), who thereafter became seriously ill with exacerbation and dissemination of the dermatitis as well as irritability and albuminuria. Mercury urine levels were 60 micrograms/L (reference less than 10 micrograms/L). The homeopathic medicine was suspended but symptoms persisted. Therefore the chelating agent D-penicillamine was administered per os (50 mg/kg/day during 10 days). The clinical conditions improved and urinary levels of mercury decreased to normal values. We concluded that homeopathic medicaments should be recognised as potentially harmful substances.     

Thanatogenesis variants in drug use poisoning

The study of 179 autopsy cases of narcotic poisoning has distinguished four main types of tanatogenesis, the "brain death" being most frequent. The second type was tanatogenesis by type of "sudden cardiac death" with ventricular fibrillation. The third one is tanatogenesis by type of "toxic edema of the lungs" with severe respiratory failure. Rare types of tanatogenesis were acute adrenal failure, anaphylactic shock and others. Combination of several tanatogenesis types was frequent.     

An information system for drug prescription and distribution in a public hospital

With 773 beds and 3696 employees, the Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeir?o Preto (HCFMRP)-Universidade de S?o Paulo, is one of the largest medical institutions in Latin America. The complete process of prescribing and distributing medication at HCFMRP involves the following stages: prescribing (physicians); ordering (infirmary); separating and dispensing (main drugstore); verifying and administering (infirmary). This was a manual process, normally taking place in the morning. Bottlenecks were inevitable and the risk of errors was elevated. An information system (IS) was devised and implemented with a view to controlling such problems. This article addresses the construction of this system and reports on a survey in which different groups of users have evaluated the project.     

Crowdsourcing Twitter annotations to identify first-hand experiences of prescription drug use

Self-reported patient data has been shown to be a valuable knowledge source for post-market pharmacovigilance. In this paper we propose using the popular micro-blogging service Twitter to gather evidence about adverse drug reactions (ADRs) after firstly having identified micro-blog messages (also know as “tweets”) that report first-hand experience. In order to achieve this goal we explore machine learning with data crowdsourced from laymen annotators. With the help of lay annotators recruited from CrowdFlower we manually annotated 1548 tweets containing keywords related to two kinds of drugs: SSRIs (eg. Paroxetine), and cognitive enhancers (eg. Ritalin). Our results show that inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss’ kappa) for crowdsourcing ranks in moderate agreement with a pair of experienced annotators (Spearman’s Rho = 0.471). We utilized the gold standard annotations from CrowdFlower for automatically training a range of supervised machine learning models to recognize first-hand experience. F-Score values are reported for 6 of these techniques with the Bayesian Generalized Linear Model being the best (F-Score = 0.64 and Informedness = 0.43) when combined with a selected set of features obtained by using information gain criteria.     

The relationship between psychoneurotic status and psychoactive drug prescription in general practice

Psychoneurotic scores in a sample of all patients between the ages of 17 and 70 in a group practice have been studied, and the relationship with psychoactive drug prescribing examined. In addition some social factors have been studied, namely, the use of alcohol and tobacco, and self-medication.The psychoneurotic scores of those prescribed psychoactive drugs are significantly higher than those for the general population, but do not fall after treatment.     

Fatal poisoning from liquid dimethylmercury: a neuropathologic study.

Since ancient times, mercury has been recognized as a toxic substance. Dimethylmercury, a volatile liquid organic mercury compound, is used by a small number of chemistry laboratories as a reference material in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. To our knowledge, dimethylmercury has been reported in only three cases of human poisoning, each proving fatal. Very small amounts of this highly toxic chemical can result in devastating neurological damage and death. We report the neuropathologic findings in a fatal case of dimethylmercury intoxication occurring in a laboratory researcher that resulted from a small accidental spill. We compare these findings to those reported in one previously reported fatal case of dimethylmercury poisoning, and to earlier reports of monomethylmercury poisoning, and discuss the clinicopathologic correlation.