Posted on 07/28/2004 1:38:31 PM PDT by esryle
$50 says he's ID'd as the perp.
.
I think it's real. It was all over out here on the news when those notes were found.
I'm talking about sending orders to the troops to no longer take terrorists alive. I'm sorry, but intentionally poisoning babies (If true) should be met with some serious rage.
"Ricine" is the French spelling...
That's what I was thinking, but this from the article:
>>On June 16, a man told Irvine police that as he was about to feed his son, he found a note inside a jar of baby food warning that it had been contaminated. A similar case was reported by an Irvine couple on May 31 involving the same baby food, Gerber Banana Yogurt, police said. A note was also found inside that jar.<<
But I still don't think AQ would leave a note.
Oh, I forgot, there are a lot of people who fit that sick description.A few are in Boston at the moment. It makes you think.
My 12 month old neice lives in Irvine.
OK. NOW I remember. There had been the one case where they found the note in it. The SECOND one...the parent said he KNEW the bottle had not been opened at the store as it still was sealed when he opened it. He had been very careful w/the food to make sure the bottles were sealed.
The authorities were telling parents to ..... stir their baby's food first. I think I would've gone ASAP to a Plan B if I were the parent!!!!
I gathered that from my foray on google :) Wonder which spelling the perp used.
Anyway, the brief news brief didn't say "product tampering" until the last line.
Thank you for saying that - I thought I was just paranoid. Nothing ever went into my babies (0 - 3 yrs age) that I didn't manufacture myself or grind with my own grinder. I thought I was a little TOO cautious, now I feel vindicated :(
How horrific...
So obviously someone at the processing plant put the note in the jar. Wonder if it was handwritten, typed or ???
Local affiliates and other news stations in the Charleston area had not heard about the tampering.
Informed them of this thread and the links that were provided.
Most probably just localized, but as one reporter said "you can't be to careful"
Most jars of baby food have a "button" in the middle of the cap and if it is raised means the jar has been opened/tampered with. The jars make a popping sound when opened because of the vaccuum sealing.
That makes them hard to interrogate. Is the goal here revenge, or victory?
Bump!
Sounds like some wack-job nursing an anti-cop grudge. Al Qaeda wouldn't leave a note, and wouldn't leave a gap of two weeks in between discoveries of ricin. They would do a massive drop of multiple jars, and it's almost impossible to be furtive about doing that in a store. This sets off my "domestic a-hole" alarm.
If they said, I don't remember.
Castor oil makes up about 50% of the weight of the seeds. The oil is mostly ricinoleic acid, with small amounts of dihydroxystearic, linoleic, oleic, and stearic acids. It is fast drying, non-yellowing, and is valued for industrial and medicinal purposes. Most of the world’s production of castor oil goes into lubricants for fine machinery and auto engines, plastics, paints, inks, soaps, linoleum, dyes, leather preservatives, waxes, polishes, cosmetics, candles, and crayons. Evidence in Egyptian tombs indicates that the oil was used in medicine over 6,000 years ago. Hundreds of medicinal uses have been claimed over the ensuing years, with purgative, laxative, and general cure all properties cited most frequently. Ingesting large quantities of the oil can result in poisoning, and many medical professionals feel the oil is a dangerous ingredient in a variety of folk remedies.
After the oil is pressed from the seeds, the remaining “seed cake” can be used as fertilizer or as an animal feed. For feed use it first must be carefully boiled, heated, or treated by other means to inactivate the toxins present in it. The toxins in the seeds are water soluble, not lipid (oil) soluble. So, the toxins remain in the seed cake and are not released during the pressing process. The crop residues of stems are made into paper and wallboard in some parts of the world. India is the world’s leader in castor oil production, but commercial production also occurs in California and the southern United States, Australia, Brazil, Venezuela, Morocco, Taiwan, South Africa, Thailand, Haiti, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Peru, China, Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Ethiopia. Worldwide over 500,000 metric tons of castor oil are produced annually.
Lately, the extremely toxic components of Castor Beans (including the protein ricin and the alkaloid ricinine) have been the subject of much interest. The most notorious is ricin, a deadly poison found in abundance in the seed coat and in smaller amounts throughout the rest of the plant. Ricin is a water-soluble protein that inhibits protein synthesis in animal cells, leading to their death. Poisoning occurs when animals ingest broken seeds or chew the seeds. Intact seeds may pass through the digestive tract without releasing ricin.
Ricin is incredibly toxic. As little as 0.5 mg (the amount contained in several seeds) can kill an adult. One seed can kill a child. We are not the only sensitive animals. Four seeds will kill a rabbit, 5 a sheep, 6 an ox or horse, 7 a pig, 11 a dog, but it takes 80 to kill a duck. Ricin has been investigated for its potential use as an insecticide.
Symptoms of ricin poisoning begin within hours after exposure by ingestion or inhalation. They include stomach irritation, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain, increased heart rate, low blood pressure, profuse sweating, collapse, convulsions, and death within a few days. Victims that do not die in 3 to 5 days usually recover. There is no antidote for ricin poisoning. The only remedy is to give supportive medical care to minimize symptoms, and hope for the best. There are some potential medicinal uses for ricin, since it is so cytotoxic. It might be useful in bone marrow transplant procedures, and as an anti-tumor agent.
There are obvious concerns about the use of ricin as a biological weapon. What is probably the most well known example of its use as a poison occurred in1978. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC in London, was murdered as a result of having a 1 mm, ricin-laced pellet stabbed into his leg with a modified umbrella. The Bulgarian Secret Service was apparently responsible for the assassination. Other concerns about ricin include reports that it may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980’s, and that it has been found in Al Qaeda caves in Afghanistan.
Time to sell off your Gerber stock.
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