The unsolved death of Gloria Ramirez

Normally we don't prefer Wikipedia submissions when third-party articles are available, but the submitted URL here (https://thartribune.com/the-woman-who-turned-a-hospital-into...) seems a bit too sensational, and the Wikipedia article seems to have all the information, so I've gone the other way this time.

There's also this article from 1995:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/analysis-of-a-toxic-...

I don't really believe the bent on this article that the hospital was at fault. There's an implication that Lawrence Livermore was in some sort of cover up and I don't really buy that line of BS either.

Its a tragedy someone with a horrible disease was taken by fake medicine (DMSO). I do find it weird that the explanation would be dimethyl sulfate production due to a defibrillator but stranger things have happened. If she really did use an incredible quantity of the stuff I suppose it's not entirely unrealistic to believe small quantities of gas local to the body could've been produced but not enough to spread even to the other end of the room.

The only thing the hospital is liable for a mistreatment of her body by not immediately getting it to a place where it could be examined before decay set in. But, on the other hand, who can blame them. All they knew is they had a biohazard of unknown capacity. Anyone with any number of unknown, horrific, highly contagious diseases would be treated the same.

DMSO easily penetrates skin, and i'd guess in both directions. And if she or somebody got something onto her skin, that may have gotten dissolved into her system. And DMSO penetrates various types of gloves with various degrees of success, so the staff working with her could by touching her have gotten that something too.

Runners would try to treat joint pain with DMSO back in the 1980s. It did not sound like something I wished to try.

It doesn’t mention it in the Wikipedia article but I think the X files episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask” was also partially inspired by and drew some details from this case.

This article is interesting, but the title is really really strange.

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