US EPA

5361768 

Technical Report 

Death due to parathion? Exhumation of an embalmed body. $JOURNAL Clin. Toxicol 

Barquet, A; Davies, JE; Davis, JH 

1968 

3 

HAPAB The toxicological diagnosis of =death due to parathion= in a 21/2- year-old, white male child, who had ingested power from a warfarin- labeled container, is described. The child died the same day the poison ingested and on the basis of the supposed history of contamination by warfarin, death was certified as due to poisoning by this compound. Forty-two days later, the embalmed body was disinterred and an autopsy performed. Powder from the container marked warfarin, two bottles from the same lot of embalming fluid used to embalm the body and nonputrified frozen specimens of kidney tissue and gastric and intestinal contents were analyzed by the Dade County Community Pesticide Analytical Laboratory. The powder was first analyzed by untraviolet spectrophotometry, then by gas chromatography, using electron-capture and microcoulometer sulfur cell detectors and finally infrared spectrophotometry. The embalming fluid was analyzed for paranitrophenol ( PNP ), a metabolite of parathion, by the Elliot method to exclude possible interference. No interference of phenolic compounds was detected. The specimens of gastric contents and kidney tissue were analyzed for PNP by a modification of Elliot's method and intestinal contents were analyzed by gas chromatography. The powder from the container and the intestinal contents contained 12.26% and 17.42 ppm parathion, respectively, while the kidney and gastric content yielded 0.10 and 0.53 ppm PNP, respectively. To provide added confirmation that the material was parathion,the powder was also analyzed by thin-layer chromatography and infrared spectrophotometry. EPIDEMIOLOGY AND TREATMENT 69/05/00, 140 1968