A passing away lady’s smoke strangely murdered at least a dozen emergency care workers a year ago. Nothing was discovered during the inquiry until a group of scientists from a nuclear weapons lab did get involved. On February 19, 1994, at about 8:15 p.m., ambulance crews wheeled a young woman into the urgent care Medical Center in Riverside, a city in southern California. They sped through two pairs of double glass doors, made a left turn, and parked her in a small room with curtains that were designated as trauma room one.
She was fully conscious and wearing shorts and a T-shirt, but her responses to questions were usually brief and blabbering. She was breathing quickly and shallowly. Her blood pressure was dropping because her heart was beating too quickly for its rooms to fill before they pumped. According to Maureen Welch, a respiratory therapist who was working that night in the trauma room, the only point unordinary regarding her was her age.
According to Welch, older adults are the majority of those who present with such signs in the emergency room. The paramedics said that this woman was 31 years old and had cervical cancer. Gloria Ramirez was her name. Let’s know who was she and what happened to her.
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About Gloria Rameriz
Gloria Ramirez, a Riverside, California native who died on February 19, 1994, earned the nickname “the Toxic Lady” or “the Toxic Woman” after several hospital staff members became ill after coming into contact with her body and blood. She had late-stage cervical cancer and had been checked into the emergency room.
She was married and the parent of two kids. Several hospital staff members passed out while caring for Ramirez, and others suffered from symptoms like cramps and breathing problems. 5 people needed to be hospitalized, and one of them spent two weeks in a critical care unit. Ramirez passed away as a result of cancer-related problems not long after getting to the hospital. At first, the case was thought to be a mass case of hysteria.
According to a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory investigation, Ramirez self-administered dimethyl sulfoxide as a pain reliever, which in the emergency unit underwent a series of reactions that turned into dimethyl sulfate, a deadly toxic and heavily cancer-causing alkylating agent. The Riverside Coroner’s Office has approved this concept, which was also printed in the Forensic Science International journal.
Analysis & Reports
The Department of Health and Human Services of California was contacted by the local health department and 2 scientists, Drs. Ana Maria Osorio and Kirsten Waller were assigned to the investigation. 34 hospital employees who were functioning in the emergency room on February 19 were questioned.
Osorio and Waller used a structured questionnaire to discover patterns among those who had experienced serious complications, such as losing consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle aches. The risk was greatest for those who handled Ramirez’s injectable lines while they were working within feet of her.
The investigation found that those affected generally tend to be women instead of men, and all of them had regular blood tests after the inhalation. However, other factors that were linked to severe symptoms did not seem to match a situation in which smoke had been released. They thought there was widespread hysteria among the hospital staff. Gorczynski cited her own health records as support for her denial that she had been a victim of mass hysteria. She remained for two weeks in the critical care unit with respiratory problems due to exposure. Her knees experienced perivascular necrosis and hepatitis.
To look into the affair, the Riverside Coroner’s Office got in touch with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ramirez may have been using dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a solvent that is effective as a degreaser, as a quick fix for pain, according to Livermore Labs’ hypothesis. The taste of this substance, according to users, is similar to garlic. It’s available in gel form at local shops and might also account for Ramirez’s body’s oily image.
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The Livermore researchers hypothesized that Ramirez’s kidney failure-related urinary blockage may have contributed to the DMSO buildup in her system. The paramedics’ oxygen administration might have merged with the DMSO to create dimethyl sulfone (DMSO2).
Crystals of DMSO2, which are known to form at ambient temperature, were found in some of Ramirez’s blood samples. After receiving electric shock therapy during crisis defibrillation, the DMSO2 could have been transformed into dimethyl sulfate (DMSO4), the extremely toxic dimethyl ester of sulfuric acid, that may have contributed to some of the sides affects that the emergency care staff mentioned.
In The New Detectives, the Livermore researchers hypothesized that the blood temperature fluctuation from Ramirez’s body at 98.6 °F (37 °C) to the emergency room at 64 °F (18 °C) may have influenced its conversion from DMSO2 to DMSO4. Regrettably, this has not been verified.
The Body
Her severely mutilated body was set to release for an individual post-mortem and burial 2 months after Ramirez passed away. The Riverside Coroner’s Office accepted Livermore’s DMSO finding as the most likely explanation for the illnesses of the hospital staff, but her family objected. Her heart was lacking, her many body parts were infected with fecal material, and her body was too badly damaged for the pathologist working with the Ramirez relatives to evaluate a cause of death. Ramirez was entombed in Riverside’s Olivewood Memorial Park on April 20, 1994, 10 weeks after she passed away.
The Poison Lady case received international attention. In the field of medical science, nobody had ever encountered or got to hear of this. How is it possible for a dying woman to emit enough poison to poison such a large number of people while leaving no pathological traces? Ramirez’s death had a clear medical cause, though. She had developed Stage 4 cervical cancer, renal failure, and cardiac arrest. Biologically speaking, Gloria Ramirez’s death had nothing to do with the fumes. But why were there fumes?
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