Short Stuff: The Toxic Death of Gloria Ramirez

Oct 23, 2019

In 1994 the body of a woman who died in a California ER somehow became toxic and sickened 24 people. To this day, no one is sure what happened. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

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hey and welcome to the short stuff I'm Josh there's Chuck there's Dave let's get to it no need for further explanation let's just start let's go Tada February 19th 1990 for 31 year old woman brought into a hospital in Riverside California named Gloria Ramirez I like where this is going so far Chuck it's succinct it's to the point was for 60 seconds right she had been diagnosed

most with cervical cancer but that's not why she was there she was brought to the hospital because her heart was super beating it was beating out of her chest such that the chambers were not filling with blood right that was lowering the volume that her heart was pumping to the rest of her body and her blood pressure was plummeting and it was very dangerous and very strange for a 31 year old woman right but like you said she had cervical cancer so they were like okay well let's just figure this out and we'll treat her and we'll just

life-saving measures and do all we can for and so the ER staff sort of working on our like they would any other patient but they were unsuccessful in bringing her back in less than an hour she was pronounced dead by the head of the ER but it's what took place during that hour that has created a lasting mystery since February 1994 that remains unsolved to this day because by the time the head of the ER pronounced Gloria Ramirez dead the entire

emergency room all of the patients and almost all of the staff had moved out to the parking lot had evacuated the emergency room because they wanted to get as far away from Gloria Ramirez as absolutely possible right so the first thing that happened was they notice they drew some blood and they notice that the blood smells like ammonia which is not what blood smells like yeah they started looking closer and they found these crystals had solidified within the syringe and the

they were called Manila crystals I looked for 20 minutes on what Manila crystals aren't couldn't find it well no they were Manila colored crystals okay well that makes sense then yeah she the Miss Ramirez was she herself was emitting an odor on her breath it was they described it as garlicky and fruity and then her her body was seemingly covered in an oily Sheen right so so far that's not too bad

or whatever but the first big problem that they had aside from those flecks on her blood the syringe full of blood was at the the nurse who had drawn the blood fainted in the ER which is pretty unusual but even more unusual is that the nurse that she handed the syringe to also fainted staggered out of the room sat down at a nurse's station desk and just slumped over dead away also super weird but it got even weirder a third nurse and then ultimately

a fourth nurse all fainted passed out one of them started retching from nausea all seemingly because of Gloria Ramirez something was happening with Gloria Ramirez in her body that was making the ER staff sick and this was highly unusual and that's about when they evacuated the ER to get everybody as far away from Gloria Ramirez as possible yeah in the end 23 of the 37 people on staff in the ER had at least one odd symptom arranging

I'm from trimmers to apnea one of them even was in intensive care for two weeks yes pancreatitis hepatitis like weird things is like an X-Files episode basically yeah that one nurse that had all all all of those were in one nurse hepatitis pancreatitis and something called avascular necrosis which is where the bone becomes starved of oxygen and starts to die and this was concentrated in her knees this is not supposed to happen when you're just you know

in routine life saving measures to somebody who's having atrial fibrillation right so what they did was they said let's seal the body and a bag let's seal that body bag and an aluminum box and let's then seal that in a room until Hazmat can get here right Hazmat arrived that night and they said you know when we go to check this out we assume we're going to find some kind of toxic gas because everyone's getting sick here all right and it got even weirder

when they discovered that Gloria Ramirez was not omitting any kind of toxic gas yeah they expected to find something like sewer gas may be something coming from the ER and not necessarily Gloria Ramirez or phosgene gas which can produce all sorts of horrible symptoms as well and they found nothing not just on her body nothing in the bag nothing in the box that they sealed are in nothing in the room

was just nothing and yet she had made 23 of the 37 emergency room staff sick so something had happened but now they're like okay we've got a modern medical mystery on our hands so we take a break I think we should all right we'll be right back

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all right so the HazMat team checks out Gloria Ramirez nothing unusual going on not only no weird gases there were no viruses no bacteria they couldn't find any kind of biological source and so they said she died of heart failure brought on by kidney failure which was brought on by this cancer right but everyone's getting sick so they said we need to up our game here and bring in Quincy pretty much they brought in someone from Lawrence Livermore National Labs and they had better

equipment and they were basically charged with sampling tissue and sampling blood and finding out just what had happened to her yeah and so they found a lot of stuff that they expected to find but they found three things that stood out to him one was a means which are a metabolite of ammonia another thing called nicotine amides which is a B vitamin that you sometimes find in drugs because it can produce Euphoria and drug dealers will use it to extend their supply some

and the third one is dimethyl sulfone which is a metabolite of an amino acid that the body is usually capable of breaking down so it was an unusual thing to find even though it's found in the body it's usually broken down and wouldn't have shown up on a test which means that there was a lot of dimethyl sulfone in Gloria Ramirez has body yeah and that's what they honed in on the a means they said is probably from breaking down from some drug that we gave her because we were giving her

cocktails of drugs to try and stabilize her we weren't but the ER was the second one they said well this is quite a leap in my opinion the suggested maybe she was using PCP right even though they didn't find any PCP in her system yeah but at any rate they decided to focus on the third one the dimethyl sulfone which seemed to make a little bit more sense in the other two at least right and I mean like it was it was written off much less easily than the other two

so it was the one that was kind of left over and one of the researchers that Lawrence Livermore said hey dimethyl sulfone that's the type of sulfur with a single oxygen Bond but hey get this if you add two oxygen molecules to to this type of sulfur you get dimethyl sulfoxide and that's something that people use as like a topical pain reliever maybe Gloria Ramirez was using this dimethyl sulfoxide as a topical pain

lyric is didn't you say that her skin was oily so maybe that's where it came from and everyone said hey that's great but still there's nothing toxic that could knock out an entire ER from dimethyl sulfone or dimethyl sulfoxide yes but they said oh some chemical nerds stood up and said but get this you had four oxygen molecules and it's just crazy how a couple of molecules can make something deadly yeah really but you had four and you're going to get dimethyl sulfate

eight and that is if is a substance that if it's in gaseous form can kill you in 10 minutes right and they went oh yeah okay this makes a lot more sense because there can be a burning sensation there can be tissue death in the eyeballs and mucous membranes it can lead to paralysis and coma and convulsions and suddenly it starts to come in to form a little bit right so Lawrence Livermore went to the corner of Riverside California and said here is what we think we can prove

this but here's the best theory we've come up with Gloria Ramirez was using dimethyl sulfoxide DMSO as a topical pain reliever for her cervical cancer and when she was brought in for heart failure the paramedics and the ER staff started flooding her system with oxygen well that oxygen combined with breaking down dimethyl dimethyl sulfoxide managed to combine into dimethyl sulfate and that turned into some sort of

gasps that emitted from her that poisoned the ER staff and everybody said okay good enough that's the best anyone's come up with kind of I mean that was a decent Theory but they couldn't show the exact pathway that that made have taken and why her body would have converted that sulfone into sulfate right it was a good guess but they couldn't prove it necessarily and they still can it's still unproven but some people say well this is just a like no one's ever demonstrated how

happened but this is probably what happened say a lot of people and the symptoms didn't exactly match because we mention some of the doctors and nurses suffered nausea and retching and apparently sulfate doesn't produce those symptoms and nobody said my eyes burn or my mucous membrane Burns which would be like the primary symptom and everybody in the room would have it if one person was affected from being in close quarters with Gloria Ramirez ever like that that's just what would happen first

and so the symptoms not matching and then on top of that the fact that Gloria Ramirez is family said she never used DMSO right kind of shoot some holes into this Theory so over time the fact that this has remained a mystery has allowed some other ideas to kind of float to the surface to yeah Mass hysteria which is I think that's just a go to any time something happens you can't explain yeah but it was pretty cool it was particularly sexist to because they're like look it was mostly female nurses who were subject to the so of course it was mass Hysteria

right of course right and then this one is really interesting to me and also not true but an urban legend arose that the on the hospital staff there were some people smuggling ingredients for methamphetamine manufacturing through the ER and IV bags so a little Breaking Bad operation going through there right and that one of the staff accidentally gave her an IV bag with these methamphetamine ingredients and that produced this toxicity yeah

pretty interesting stuff I mean probably not the case but it's still I mean you can float interesting ideas like that because it's still not proven agreed may never be well that's the case of the toxic corpse of Gloria Ramirez may she rest in peace and since I said may she rest in peace that means that this short stuff is over right Chuck it's right there short stuff out stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio is how stuff works for more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the

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