From International Herald Tribune
Poisonous toy beads from China were not under suspicion when an Australian biochemist began trying last month to figure out why a 2-year-old boy had fallen into a shallow coma with seizure-like movements and been rushed to hospital.
Clinicians treating the boy suspected an inherited metabolic disorder. So Dr. Kevin Carpenter, a biochemical geneticist at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in a suburb of Sydney, began checking urine samples for certain chemicals. What he found instead was gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, a banned “date rape” drug that can be life threatening. [Full Text]
