Police: Woman kills husband by putting eye drops in water

If your employer discovered that you were engaging in this type of discussion on a public forum and essentially claiming that pouring a bottle of Visine in someone’s food or drink is a harmless prank... you would lose your job, just as I would have lost my job. Someone with such a cavalier attitude towards other people's safety should not be working in the position you claim to be in regardless of your technical skills.

Please provide the exact quote where I said that putting a bottle of Visine in someone's drink is a harmless prank and link or otherwise reference the post where I said that.

Obviously, reading comprehension is not your strong point. What I said is that a single bottle of Visine (15 mL) is highly unlikely to be fatal, and that it would take over 13 gallons to reach the LD50. You are reading into that a whole lot that I did not say.

My information is completely accurate, and I checked my calculations at least twice (on the back of an envelope, using the old fashioned method of multiplying and dividing with a pen and paper). (Because I actually learned to do math before there were calculators.) There is nothing irresponsible about providing exact and scientific information.

I guess that wasn’t very clear, was it?

Sorry. How about if I just withdraw the comment?

“So you put ordinary Visine into his drinking water, and it killed him?! Did he thrash about, foam at the mouth, moan in agony??!?”

It is common knowledge that eye drops can kill when taken internally.

It has been a plot point for many a tv crime show.

Can’t shitcan your wife because she gets sick on you.

John McCain.

John Edwards.

John Kerry.

Never mind, that rule is apparently null if your first name is John.

Sorry, I guess I am a little dense. LOL

5 shots of vodka with a shot every hour after that for 48 hours and you are spiffy.

“I guess I am a little dense.”

Not at all. I failed to communicate my thought.

In 1995 an adult customer at a Whole Foods market (a retail chain of natural and organic foods) had his wheat-grass smoothie spiked with a bottle of Visine by a clerk intent upon playing a practical joke. The victim, Rudy Trabanino of Houston, became violently ill and had to be hospitalized for several days with acute pain and a variety of serious medical problems. The clerk responsible for the act was dismissed, and Whole Foods Market settled out of court with Trabanino for an undisclosed sum after he brought a $1 million suit against the store.

In June 2006, five Wisconsin high school students trying to pull the Visine prank poured about a quarter of a bottle of the eyedrops into a classmate’s water. The victim spent several days in the hospital recovering from reactions to the poisoning that included a dangerously low heart rate and blood pressure. Each of the five “pranksters” pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of battery and disorderly conduct and received sentences of 18 months’ probation and 60 hours of community service.

In June 2009, Denise Moyer of Wells, Vermont, was arrested for third degree assault after police confirmed she’d spiked a co-worker’s drink with Visine a few days before the woman became ill and died. The assault took place on 31 October 2008 at a Halloween party, and on 2 November 2008, 49-year-old Marceline Jones of Comstock died of what were then presumed to be natural causes. - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-visine-causes-diarrhea/

Of course, there are those who poison others with false and teaching, esp. poisoning the minds of the young and culture in general against God. Christ, and Biblical teaching and morality. Others "kill" their kids with "kindness," from obesity to lack of discipline.

I have heard that rapist spike drinks with Visine?

My information is completely accurate, and I checked my calculations at least twice (on the back of an envelope, using the old fashioned method of multiplying and dividing with a pen and paper). (Because I actually learned to do math before there were calculators.) There is nothing irresponsible about providing exact and scientific information.

Thanks for providing me with more chuckles and reminding me how good it is to be retired and not having to deal with subordinates who sometimes seem to have no common sense. And I truly mean that... I have no animosity toward you. But rest assured I have had similar conversations in the past.

Please try to follow me on this... You just repeated that you carefully calculated that someone would have to drink 13 gallons of Visine to reach LD50. But I noted previously that most people will die if they drink less than 2 gallons of pure water in one sitting. The definition of LD50 is “the amount of a substance that is sufficient to kill 50 percent of a population of animals”. So while I am not questioning the method of your calculations I am still “guestimating” that your results are off by a factor of at least 6.5 times. This seems to be because of your inability to comprehend the big picture on this one and your focus on something that is almost meaningless in this conversation.

You and I both appear to have professional training. The difference seems to be that I was trained with the goal of identifying and evaluating and mitigating hazards to the public and my team from chemical and biologic agents. That was a big part of my job. Sometimes the primary hazards are much different than what the obvious calculations would indicate.

As far as what the point of your telling people in this conversation that they would have to swallow 13 gallons of Visine to reach LD50... at this point I really do not know what that is. Considering that there is a massive amount of data showing that people have had serious medical problems from ingesting just a few milliliters... you sound like someone who has become “out of touch” with reality.

In June 2009, Denise Moyer of Wells, Vermont, was arrested for third degree assault after police confirmed she’d spiked a co-worker’s drink with Visine a few days before the woman became ill and died.

Thank you for your post. After the movie “Wedding Crashers” came out my crews and I responded to a rash of medical calls resulting from people having their food and drinks “spiked” with eye drops. We realized that this was much more serious than just a “prank”. Those who are making light of the story of this man dying after his wife repeatedly mixed eye drops into his food and drinks, just do not have a clue.

Our neighbors had a sickly toddler. The doctors said that he was “failing to thrive”. He was a cute little guy and fortunately he has grown up to be a great teen. His dad told us a few years back that medical tests finally confirmed that he was continually ingesting something that was making him ill. No arrests were made and I was not told what the substance was, but the little guy got better and his mom received psychological counseling. But poisoning especially vulnerable people without their knowledge or consent is a really despicable crime.

My wife is highly allergic to sea food and once had a severe reaction where she stopped breathing and had to be intubated at the hospital. I have an unusual reaction to pseudoephedrine... a minute amount causes me to become ill and all of my skin peels off like I had a very bad sunburn. Different people react in a wide variety of ways to chemical and biological substances.

Not all of those who can read an MSDS sheet and do simple arithmetic are medical experts and they can get into serious difficulty if they represent themselves as such.

After the movie “Wedding Crashers” came out my crews and I responded to a rash of medical calls resulting from people having their food and drinks “spiked” with eye drops

You must have a lot of interesting stories!

My wife is highly allergic to sea food and once had a severe reaction where she stopped breathing and had to be intubated at the hospital.

Wow.

I have an unusual reaction to pseudoephedrine..

And I found out during a bad cold that Sudafed PE (phenylephrine) is almost useless, versus the old formula with pseudoephedrine, which in most states, is located behind the pharmacy counter and require a photo ID and signature due to the Combat Methamphetamine Act. For pseudoephedrine's membership in the amphetamine class has made it a "sought-after chemical precursor in the illicit manufacture of methamphetamine and methcathinone." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoephedrine

But pot is legal in some states.

a minute amount causes me to become ill and all of my skin peels off like I had a very bad sunburn.

The latter I know of. After a few hours in the sun as a 14 year-old of Irish/Scottish descent, who forsook the law of his mother (cover up soon), I came home very sun-burned. Soon i could not walk, and had a big blister the size of a tennis ball on one leg, and another the size of a gold ball, and sheets of skin coming off my back. Parent even took me to the doc who said was 2nd degree burns, and would take my skin 6 months to heal (white privilege).

I think you have a couple of issues going on. First, you read my science based assessment of the actual toxicity of tetrahydrozoline and jumped to all kinds of conclusions that had nothing to do with what I posted. Second, by reading your posts, I think you have a serious case of Dunning-Kruger going on--in your case, being that you know something about chem-bio hazards, but think your knowledge base is much greater than it really is.

Thanks for providing me with more chuckles and reminding me how good it is to be retired and not having to deal with subordinates who sometimes seem to have no common sense. And I truly mean that... I have no animosity toward you. But rest assured I have had similar conversations in the past.

You are both underestimating my position and my education. I suspect that you are doing so intentionally to try to put me down and pass yourself off as being much more knowledgeable than I (people have tried to do that before). I am a doctor of the Ph.D. type; I work in medical research where I supervise a number of Ph.D. scientists involved in toxicology research. So, rather than being some bachelor or masters level subordinate as you assume, I am the boss.

Please try to follow me on this... You just repeated that you carefully calculated that someone would have to drink 13 gallons of Visine to reach LD50. But I noted previously that most people will die if they drink less than 2 gallons of pure water in one sitting. (…) This seems to be because of your inability to comprehend the big picture on this one and your focus on something that is almost meaningless in this conversation.

Do you really miss so completely the implications of my LD50 calculations as they pertain to the quantity of active ingredient in Visine?

I calculated the LD50 for a 75 kg human. It is a ballpark calculation, since I only have the data of an oral LD50 for mice, mice are not humans, and no one will ever calculate an LD50 in a human population. Okay, so the ballpark calculation is that ~25 g would be an LD50 in a 75 kg human. And calculating from that, I figured that it would take ~13 gallons of Visine to reach the LD50 of the active ingredient. Not of the buffered saline vehicle used to deliver the active ingredient, but of the active ingredient itself. What I am not saying, that you automatically assumed, is that someone could poison someone else by forcing them to drink 13 gallons of Visine. It's not going to happen. The take-home message that you *should* have gotten is that the volume of Visine required to deliver an LD50 of the active ingredient is so large that the idea of poisoning someone by putting a few drops of Visine daily into their coffee is far-fetched (to say the least). Could she have poisoned her husband with tetrahydrozoline? Yes, but not by using Visine. If she had access to the pure chemical, and if it didn't have a taste that would alert his suspicions, etc., she could have done it.

You and I both appear to have professional training. The difference seems to be that I was trained with the goal of identifying and evaluating and mitigating hazards to the public and my team from chemical and biologic agents.

And who comes up with the information that you learned during your training, I wonder? Could it be people like me, who actually do the research in the chem-bio field to determine what the important facts are for you to know? Hmm.

As far as what the point of your telling people in this conversation that they would have to swallow 13 gallons of Visine to reach LD50... at this point I really do not know what that is. Considering that there is a massive amount of data showing that people have had serious medical problems from ingesting just a few milliliters... you sound like someone who has become “out of touch” with reality.

Again, you seemed to have missed entirely the point of my LD50 calculation. I did it because I have doubts about the story as presented, and I was expressing those doubts. No doubt, when the trial takes place and the experts are called to testify, the entire picture will emerge. And probably will not be newsworthy, so we'll never know the details (unless we care enough about the case to look it up later, which I don't). For all I know, the medical experts in the trial will establish that he had "large amounts of tetrahydrozoline in his body" resulting from using Visine daily to moisturize his eyes--which means that he was swallowing it voluntarily, because the physiology of the eyes is such that everyone swallows eyedrops when they use them. And the wife will go home, exonerated.

And one other thing. You have described yourself as a first responder, and you have said more than once that you would never tell a patient that their dose was insignificant. Fine, I would not expect a first responder to have the knowledge or diagnostic tools available to make that determination. But you have heard of the term "worried well," haven't you? You've mentioned that some movie led to you having to respond to a number of copycat incidents. So people who saw that movie noted that the punch tasted funny, they saw an empty bottle of Visine nearby, and now they are having symptoms. How do you, as a first responder, differentiate their symptoms between "worried well" and actual intoxication? Especially since the symptoms might very well be identical in both cases? I don't think you do. That's for the medical people to decide, using information and tools developed by people like me.

I appreciate your extremely detailed response. And I am in awe of not only your PhD level education in chemistry as it relates to human physiology, but also your ability to diagnose my psychological condition from a short written discussion and no actual face to face meeting. When comparing your abilities to those of the medical professionals who after physically examining patients who have seemingly had severe reactions or even died after ingesting much less than 13 gallons of Visine... and have determined that their patient’s difficulties have had something to do with the eye drops... obviously, compared to you those medical doctors are idiots and you are some type of savant. Are those fools are even capable of doing multiplication and division with just a piece of paper and a pen as you are? /S (that means sarcasm in case you couldn't figure it out)

If in fact someone with your complete lack of common sense, simple reasoning abilities and hubris has been able to make it to the PhD level in any technical field and then supervise others... it scares the hell out of this lowly firefighter. LOL!!!

During my career I was actually required to testify in court as an “expert witness” on occasion. If I had engaged in a conversation on a public forum such as this and made statements similar to yours... the lawyers would have destroyed me. And believe me, and when they want to they have ways of digging this stuff up.

In all seriousness and sincerity it sounds like you have a reputation which is valuable and should be protected. So as a friend with similar political views I caution you once again to carefully consider the content of your posts here.

I am going to repeat myself in case you were not able to make it through my last post. You claim to have a high level of education and a supervisory position and presumably a reputation to protect. One of the first thing lawyers do these days before taking any action is having their subordinates check the social media posts from major players down to members of the jury.

If you do not believe that what you post here could be discovered and become a factor in anything from your continued employment to your credibility in front of a jury... you are foolish. Just a simple “google” search of your pseudonym “exdemmom” reveals much more than you probably realize. Have fun here, but always try to keep that in mind, especially when claiming to have expert knowledge. I tell you this as someone with similar political views who considers you to be a valuable asset to the community here.