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Blogs by Janice B. Scott
A chilling thought 5/11/2011 8:18:00 AM
An insecticide spray over-zealously used for bed bugs, causes three deaths.
For my next novel - a murder/mystery - I've been researching the effects of various poisons. It's the sort of research that makes interesting reading.
Today Ian read out an article he'd discovered on the BBC news website, about a number of people who had died in a Thai hotel under mysterious circumstances. Not murder or anything like that, but they had all died suddenly and inexplicably. The diagnosis in each case was a heart attack, but one victim was only twenty three years old.
The twenty-three year old's father refused to accept the diagnosis and made further inquiries. It turned out that the deaths had been caused by over-zealous spraying of the beds with insecticide, to kill the bed bugs.
Apparently, the main ingredient in the spray (chlorpyrifos) is quickly absorbed through the skin but disappears from the body equally quickly, so is difficult to identify through blood tests. But traces of it were still found in the room three months after the deaths, and after intensive cleaning.
The article makes chilling reading, but what an idea for a novel! My brain is beginning to whir...
