Annual report of the Medical and Sanitary Department / Sierra Leone.

  • Sierra Leone. Medical and Sanitary Department.
Date:
[1929]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Medical and Sanitary Department / Sierra Leone. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    44/118 (page 32)
    Scarcely less uncanny is the sui poisoning from fine needles prepared from the ground-up paste of seeds of Abrus precatorius. The active principle, abrin, is harmless when eaten, but beneath the skin the lethal dose is 0*00001 grn. per kilo of body weight. Usually it is rapidly fatal, but in the case of one man, he was awakened by feeling something pricking his cheek. He extracted the sui immediately but died two days later. The “ needles ” which are very small may be directed through a blow-pipe or planted in the skin by a light flick with a. stick to which they are previously attached. The possibility of delayed poisoning has been denied by some, but the findings in a case occurring in Sierra Leone open up a fresh avenue of thought. An alleged poison employed with criminal intent was found to be but human fasces, but, nevertheless, the specimen showed a high content of hookworm eggs. Professor Gordon of the Sir Alfred Lewis Jones Research Laboratory suggested the possibility to me. What more potent delayed * poison than an intense infestation with hookworm V The intestinal discomfort, the bronchitis, the progressive anasmia and wasting added to the brooding fear of “juju ” and the thraldom of tradition bring the victim by slow and painful steps to an early death. Is it not possible that experience accumulating over long years may have taught the medicine man that there is some lethal principle in such specimens, perhaps not always hookworm, but some other parasite ? It seems a toxicologist’s nightmare to suggest being done to death by worms, long or short, fat or thin, by schistosomes or tapeworms, yet surely potential doom might lurk in such weapons. After slow months of sickness, who could lay such a death at the door of the perpetrator ? Poisoning in West Africa and elsewhere in the tropics demands greater consideration than heretofore. References. 1. Frazer. Golden Bough. Pt. 11. 134. 2. Ibid. Pt. 111. 197. 3. Bequasrt. Bull. Soc. Path. Exot. 1920. July 7. Vol. 13. No. 7. 486-89. ■iid v,:.i >'■ <: -’<S hy.tlid >•) !: / ■ * >-U4 >. 1 ‘'li htU. )■ i ,5.iO -t i-i'tU .n* Lit. id ■ ■. t * - ■ , ^ Y--V;. ' l(. / *