Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease

We report a rare case of fatal intoxication in a 40-year-old man caused by injection of a fluid containing organic mercury, allegedly in an attack with a syringe fixed to the tip of an umbrella. The man suffered from severe neurological symptoms and progressive multiorgan failure and died 10 months...

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Autores principales: Albers, Anne, Gies, Ursula, Raatschen, Hans-Jurgen, Klintschar, Michael
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2020
Materias:
Case Report
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7449996/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32323188
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12024-020-00247-y
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author Albers, Anne
Gies, Ursula
Raatschen, Hans-Jurgen
Klintschar, Michael
author_facet Albers, Anne
Gies, Ursula
Raatschen, Hans-Jurgen
Klintschar, Michael
author_sort Albers, Anne
collection PubMed
description We report a rare case of fatal intoxication in a 40-year-old man caused by injection of a fluid containing organic mercury, allegedly in an attack with a syringe fixed to the tip of an umbrella. The man suffered from severe neurological symptoms and progressive multiorgan failure and died 10 months later in refractory status epilepticus. Autopsy revealed severe brain atrophy and non-specific kidney damage. Neuropathological examination showed neuronal loss especially in the occipital lobe, distinct granule cell necrosis in the cerebellum and Wallerian degeneration in the brainstem. Postmortem toxicological analysis revealed extremely increased levels of mercury in liver and kidney tissue as well as methylmercury levels in peripheral blood.
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spelling pubmed-74499962020-09-02 Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease Albers, Anne Gies, Ursula Raatschen, Hans-Jurgen Klintschar, Michael Forensic Sci Med Pathol Case Report We report a rare case of fatal intoxication in a 40-year-old man caused by injection of a fluid containing organic mercury, allegedly in an attack with a syringe fixed to the tip of an umbrella. The man suffered from severe neurological symptoms and progressive multiorgan failure and died 10 months later in refractory status epilepticus. Autopsy revealed severe brain atrophy and non-specific kidney damage. Neuropathological examination showed neuronal loss especially in the occipital lobe, distinct granule cell necrosis in the cerebellum and Wallerian degeneration in the brainstem. Postmortem toxicological analysis revealed extremely increased levels of mercury in liver and kidney tissue as well as methylmercury levels in peripheral blood. Springer US 2020-04-22 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7449996/ /pubmed/32323188 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12024-020-00247-y Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Case Report
Albers, Anne
Gies, Ursula
Raatschen, Hans-Jurgen
Klintschar, Michael
Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title_full Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title_fullStr Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title_full_unstemmed Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title_short Another umbrella murder? – A rare case of Minamata disease
title_sort another umbrella murder? – a rare case of minamata disease
topic Case Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7449996/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32323188
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12024-020-00247-y
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