The Poisoning Needle - Essay Example

The Poisoning Needle In summer1961, flocks of birds swooped into the seaside Capitola, a town in California. The birds behaved weirdly, crashing intothe window panes, breaking through and attacking people, leaving many dead and injured. This specie of the birds was generally quite nonaggressive in nature and quite unlikely to display such an attack upon the humans. There birds fed on small fish and bred on the shores. This behavior of the birds was unanticipated and instigated a wave of curiosity in the scientists and researchers.

About two and a half decades later, in winter 1987, a similar unanticipated and unexpected accident happened in a range of restaurants in Canada located around the Prince Edward Island (Larner 2008, 203). In a matter of few hours, hundreds of people became severely ill after eating the cultured blue mussels in the restaurants. It was not an ordinary food poisoning accident. It was much more than that as it caused short-term memory loss in many of the victims. Symptoms were far more serious and diversified than what are caused by food poisoning.

“Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea, and incapacitating headaches were followed by confusion, loss of memory, disorientation, and (in severe cases) seizures and coma” (Senese 2010). The accident caused death of three elderly victims. It was the result of a strange syndrome that was named “amnesic shellfish poisoning.” There was a strong need to identify the cause of accident in order to prevent further accidents of the like. Therefore, the Department of Fisheries and Ocean (DFO), Canada quickly formed a team of chemists and marine biologists to carry out the research and identify the toxic agent (gov.pe.ca 2004).

It was a very cumbersome job, as the team was entitled to identify a toxic agent from among thousands of chemicals present in the blue mussels and to top it all, they were unaware of the properties of the strange toxic agent as they were yet to be found. A strategy based on the divide-and-discard process was adopted to identify the toxic agent. The experiment was conducted over mice and the samples causing the mice to display strange behavior were collected and processed further. The staged and organized process adopted by the team to identify the toxic agent is shown in the figure below:Process for identifying toxic agent in the amnesic shellfish poisoning (Senese 2010).

Presence of the same domoic acid in the small fish eaten by the birds gone crazy in 1961 and in the blue mussels consumed by people in 1987 caused two of the strangest accidents in the history. After an extensive research, it was found that domoic acid was present in a needle-like diatom species, which was named as Pseudo-nitzschia pungens. Presently, the diatom blooms that produce domoic acid are expanding in number all over the world, thus presenting a potential threat to the health of animals as well as humans (Lefebvre and Robertson 2010).

Pseudo-nitzschia pungens are present in oceans, so further accidents are not strange to happen, to avoid which, commercial seafood in general and the shellfish in particular is regularly checked to make sure it is free of domoic acid. So far, the testing procedures have been quite successful as the same accident has never happened ever since. Bibliographygov.pe.ca., “Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning: Domoic Acid Production by Pseudo-nitzschia Diatoms,” 2004, accessed February 2, 2012, http://www.gov.pe.

ca/photos/original/af_domoic_acid.pdf. Larner, A.J. Neuropsychological neurology: the neurocognitive impairments of neurological disorders (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 203. Lefebvre, K.A. and Robertson, A. “Domoic acid and human exposure risks: a review,” Toxicon 56(2010): 218-230. Senese, Fred. “How techniques for separating mixtures helped solve a deadly mystery”, 2010, accessed February 2, 2012, http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/features/domoic.shtml.