Gloria Ramirez was known to be the life of the party, a woman who was admired for her
joie de vivre.
Indeed, she was loved by everyone, foremost by her two children and her husband, the reverend
Brian Taylor.
Nothing about her life hinted at the fact that coursing through her veins, a toxic mystery
threatened to break out at any time.
All that changed on the fateful day of February 19, 1994, when she was rushed to the General
Hospital in Riverside, California.
Her heart was racing and her blood pressure had become dangerously low.
The woman could hardly string a sentence together and things didn’t look good at all.
The doctors and nurses did their best to keep Ramirez alive, but what has confounded the
scientific community ever since is the fact that many of the people who treated her came
down with something awful and unexplainable.
It was as if Ramirez was toxic, her very presence like the approach of death’s pale shadow
for medical stuff unfortunate enough to be around her...
But how does a person become toxic?
This case was unheard of, and as you’ll find out, scientists are still debating what
happened.
Conspiracy theorists have their say in the matter, and if they’re right, something
very dark happened that day.
Maybe here at the Infographics Show we can get to the bottom of this case.
We’ll try our best, but we warn you, it’s a complicated and amazing story at the same
time.
First of all, you should know that when Ramirez was admitted to the emergency room she was
already suffering from the late stages of cervical cancer.
She’d only known this for six weeks, since the cancer was what is sometimes called the
silent type.
Her having cancer is an important matter in this story, but it surely doesn’t explain
what happened next.
Ok, so Ramirez was in a state of shock…she could hardly speak and her heart rate was
not stable and her breathing was erratic.
When asked to move her limbs or respond to questions she was unable to do so.
A nurse gave her three different kinds of sedatives to try and calm her down, but they
had no effect at all.
Things were now getting serious…Ramirez’s heart was failing her…the poor lady was
staring death in the face.
The doctor said this woman is going to die…bring out the defibrillator.
Everyone stood back, and BOOM, hundreds of volts of electricity were delivered to Ramirez
to try and get her heart beating correctly again.
It wasn’t working, so they gave her another shock.
At this point something strange happened…something none of the people around Ramirez had ever
seen before.
Her chest was suddenly covered in a viscous, oil-like substance, and a nurse said that
a garlic smell was coming from the dying woman’s mouth.
This was not a vague smell…it filled the entire room and everyone noticed it.
The puzzled and bewildered nurses and doctors, who had never seen anything like this before,
took a blood sample from Ramirez’s arm.
But when they drew her blood, they made another shocking discovery- her blood positively reeked
of ammonia, strong enough to make some of the hospital staff choke and gag.
The nurse who drew the blood, one Susan Kane, noticed that strange clumps of something were
floating around in Ramirez’s arm, and she turned to her colleague, Julie Corchynksi.
“Hey, do you think these strange particles could be what’s causing the ammonia smell?
Before Gorchynski could even respond, Kane fainted and fell to the floor.
A few minutes later, Gorchynski said she felt terribly light-headed and felt as if she was
about to throw up.
Like Kane, she was taken out of the emergency room, but before she could be asked about
her symptoms she also fainted.
Ramirez’s blood was toxic, possibly lethal.
The emergency medical personnel sprung into action to contain the situation, but one by
one they too fell victims to Ramirez’s toxic, alien-like blood.
A respiratory therapist named Maureen Welch was the next to go.
One second she was standing up, and the next second she was on the floor.
Something strange was certainly afoot, so the head doctor said get all the people outside
the emergency ward immediately and take them to the parking lot.
Something toxic was indeed making people very ill, and it was coming from Ramirez, who seemed
unaffected by her own volatile blood!
But of course they couldn’t just leave Ramirez lying there.
Some staff had to stay behind to try and keep the woman alive.
The sad thing is, after 45 minutes of CPR and defibrillation, she died of kidney failure
that was related to her cancer.
Her death was not that unusual since she was in the late stages of cancer, but what was
incredibly unusual was the fact that 23 people who’d been close to this so-called toxic
lady became ill, with five folks having to be hospitalized because of dangerous muscle
spasms and shortness of breath.
One person almost didn’t make it, but recovered after two weeks in intensive care.
After that, she had lifelong health problems.
. A team of people dressed in hazmat suits were
called in to handle the body and then check the room for any signs of toxins, strange
gases, or anything else that could make people ill.
They found nothing out of the ordinary.
There was no sign of anything that could have made people pass out.
The Department of Health and Human Services was then called in and two doctors investigated
the case.
Could the woman really have been toxic?
Was there such a thing as a toxic lady?
It was totally unheard of….it still is for that matter.
So, those two doctors, Ana Maria Osorio and Kirsten Waller, interviewed all the people
who had been in the emergency room that day.
That amounted to 34 staff, but it appeared that those who suffered the most severe illness
were the ones who had been the closest to Ramirez.
Most of the severe cases had been women, but all their blood tests revealed that nothing
had contaminated them.
This didn’t make sense to the investigators, and they simply said that those people were
merely the victims of mass hysteria.
Maybe you don’t know this, but mass hysteria tends to affect women more than men.
Ok, so case closed.
Those health professionals had just come down with a malady of the mind…
No, the case wasn’t closed, and it wouldn’t be closed for a long time to come.
Some of those women that had been the worst affected were irate that the investigators
had said they’d been sickened only by a temporary madness.
They knew how they had felt…they had smelled the vicious odor coming from Ramirez’s body…they
had seen with their own eyes the sheen on her body and the strange particles in her
blood.
And anyway, they were seasoned professionals...they wouldn’t become hysterical at the sight
of a sick person.
Was that investigation some kind of cover-up?
What was the hospital trying to hide?
Gorchynski was the iratest and she deserved to be, since after the incident she developed
hepatitis and something called avascular necrosis in her knees.
In simple terms that’s the death of bone tissue.
It’s a serious condition, and so of course Gorchynski didn’t like being told she had
merely been hysterical.
She was right to be suspicious.
Now the story takes another turn, but certainly not its last turn.
Forensic pathologists came up with a postulation as to what might have happened.
We say might, because a lot of experts in the medical field did not agree with their
report.
They said that Ramirez had been taking something called dimethyl sulfoxide, what’s usually
referred to as DMSO.
This can be used to treat pain, or speed up the healing of wounds.
It can be orally ingested or applied to the skin as a gel or cream.
There’s nothing too usual about taking DMSO, and it’s a drug that has been approved by
the FDA.
Moreover, those that have tasted it have said it tastes like garlic.
Hmm, so was this drug the reason for the garlic smell coming from Ramirez?
And could the sheen on her body have been from DMSO gel or cream?
Even if she had daubed herself with DMSO, that wouldn’t have made people faint.
The investigators then added some more to the story.
They explained that when Ramirez was given oxygen, that might have turned DMSO into something
called dimethyl sulfone (DMSO2).
This substance has also been used as a medicine by people, and some experts believe it can
promote better health in small doses.
Trials, however, have revealed it can also have some nasty side effects.
The forensic pathologists said in their report that since this substance crystallizes at
room temperature that would explain the particles seen in Ramirez blood.
The report said there was a reason why things went crazy, and they postulated that the DMSO2
was then turned into the highly toxic dimethyl sulfate (DMSO4) after the electric shocks
were given to Ramirez.
They also said that the change in room temperature and oxygen being added to DMSO2 could have
converted it to the toxic DMSO4.
If a person inhales the vapors of dimethyl sulfate they can die over a period of hours.
In fact, one investigator read in a classified Department of Defense document that was written
in 1987 that just ten minutes’ exposure to this substance can kill a person over a
period of time.
The document said that just one gram of it when dispersed in a cubic meter of air can
kill the people that breathe it.
The thing was, the Ramirez family said she had never taken DMSO and wouldn’t have done
such a thing.
They called the hospital out and said the DMSO story was a big bag of bull and they
were covering something up.
What happened next is Ramirez was dug up, but this was two months after she’d been
buried.
The family demanded an independent autopsy, but the problem was her heart was missing.This
meant the family’s pathologist couldn’t really say what had happened.
He said the body was so decomposed it was difficult to get to the truth.
. Meanwhile, the Riverside Coroner's Office
stuck with the DMSO story.
The family was incensed, knowing full well that Ramirez had never used DMSO.
Her husband said he knew this for a matter of fact.
Other medical experts have chimed in on the matter saying that while the story is exceptional
and incredibly unusual, the DMSO postulation is the only thing that makes sense.
Still it’s only a theory, just one that is an incredible theory, according to some
experts in medical science.
Not all medical science, though, including Hans Reich, a man who was an organic chemist
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He’d worked with these substances before and he said just couldn’t see DMSO going
through these stages and turning into a dangerous vapor.
Then there were even more medical experts who came out and said the symptoms that the
hospital staff experienced just didn’t match dimethyl sulfate poisoning.
The reason they knew what the symptoms look like was because in the past industrial workers
had been accidentally exposed to the stuff.
A physiologist and professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico named Jack
de la Torre said that exposure to the substance in vapor form would first act like tear gas
and the hospital staff would have cried.
That didn’t happen.
He said that if dimethyl sulfate was to blame, it would have taken several hours for the
nasty effects to happen, and that would have affected the people’s eyes, nose and mouth
and finally got in the lungs and possibly caused pulmonary edema.
Fainting on the spot, said de la Torre, aint what happens when you get hit with DMSO4.
Yet another medical expert called the DMSO4 theory a “chemical impossibility.”
Perhaps the incredible theory was not DMSO4 poisoning but the possibility of those staff
being exposed to a substance called Methylamine.
This smells like ammonia, and remember that Ramirez blood had the smell of ammonia.
Methylamine exposure can also cause eye, nose and throat irritation and if enough is breathed
in it can lead to edema of the lungs.
It can also cause dizziness and fainting, according to the National Advisory Committee
for Acute Exposure Guideline Levels for Hazardous 5 Substances.
What you might not know about this substance is the fact it’s used to make the illegal
drug called methamphetamine.
You might also not know that at the time Riverside County was a main distribution point for this
very strong type of speed.
But why on Earth would meth have been in a hospital?
The reason, say some conspiracy theorists, is that some staff were using IV bags to smuggle
meth.
It dissolves in water and it’s sometimes transported in water.
If Ramirez was put on a meth drip, that would explain the fact her heart rate went through
the roof and she might have actually died of an overdose.
We should say that this is a wild theory and there’s nothing substantial to back it up,
and it’s highly unlikely that meth vapors would have been so toxic to the staff at the
hospital.
In the end, the story remains one of medical sciences greatest mysteries.
How did a dying woman become a chemical timebomb for the people around her?
Maybe some of our sleuths watching this show can put forward their own theory.
Now you really have to see this show, “What Is The Deadliest Substance On Earth?
Toxicity Comparison.”
Or, take a look at this video...