You knew there would be something coming to draw press attention off the real news; it appears to have arrived.
AUSTIN – AP – A University of Texas student found a substance that has tested positive for ricin, a potentially deadly poison, in a roll of quarters she was using to do laundry in her dormitory, officials said.
The student and her roommate were being treated for potential exposure to the poison, although neither has exhibited symptoms, said Dr. Theresa Spalding of UT Student Health Services.
The student told university police she found the chunky powder Thursday as she was doing her laundry at the Moore-Hill dormitory, Spalding said. Preliminary tests for ricin came back positive Friday.
“We were very concerned as soon as we heard about the positive testing late this evening,” Spalding said. She said the quarters had been in the students’ dorm room for several months.
This seems like an odd story, doesn’t it? I don’t know anything about the substance, but from the article, it must be safe to store it in a roll of quarters for long periods of time.
Here is a link to the CDC’s fact sheet on ricin. It’s derived from castor beans.
of a student hoax, or prank. Yeah, yeah, ill-considered, but how many of the pranks we pulled when we were undergrads were in stunningly good taste?
Will wait. Will see.
You’re right – it has undergrad prank or disgruntled boyfriend written all over it. Second choice – the anthrax mailer. Not even in the running – AlQaida. Be interesting to see how it plays out in the media, though.
You can buy castor bean seeds in any garden catalog. They grow pretty vines. If you ground them up you’d get “a substance that has tested positive for ricin”. People have had castor vines in gardens forever, and successfully kept their kids from eating the nice beans. Or the pretty nightshade or monkshood or lily of the valley, or the hundreds of other poisonous plants in their backyard. That was back when “American intelligence” was not an oxymoron.
But now we got a crisis here in River City. Some brave pol will no doubt now bravely stand up for the security of all good Americans and try to ban the sale of castor beans. God bless America.
Oy.
Prank or no – life in these united states just gets weirder and weirder. Why are they testing strange powder for ricin?
My knee-jerk reaction: Oh, Texas. (that from a Floridian – Who hasn’t said Oh, Florida?)
Has this woman never heard of detergent or are Texans too used to money laundering??
Surely apart from anything else any large amount would throw out the machines used to weigh the roll to ensure it was the right amount of “cash money” as Bush puts it. One possibility is that somebody overenthusiastically used a lubricant containing caster oil to oil the packing machine and it got on the coins. If it was a powder it does, as you suggest, look like a prank.
In any case, the concentration and amount of the ricin in the sample would be significant. Caster oil sold as a purgative contains ricin as its main active ingredient, even if the aounts are tiny. As you say, a ground up caster oil plant seed contains it but again the concentration would be fairly low even and not cause anything more than a stomach upset unless there were several in the sample. One thing is for sure, even a quantity enough to fill a roll of quarters would not be a significantly widespread danger.