KU graduate student in critical but stable condition after chemical contamination / LJWorld.com

Archive for Thursday, November 5, 2009

A Kansas University graduate student was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries Thursday after accidentally ingesting a toxic chemical while working in a university lab, KU officials said.

By Jesse Fray

November 5, 2009, 8:05 a.m. Updated November 5, 2009, 4:57 p.m.

KU investigates toxic chemical incident

KU officials discuss the events of Thursday morning, after being notified of a possible chemical spill in Malott Hall. Enlarge video

A Kansas University graduate student was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries Thursday after accidentally ingesting a toxic chemical while working in a university lab, KU officials said.

University officials would not identify the student, who they said suffered cardiovascular and breathing problems and was in critical but stable condition at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

Chris Keary, assistant KU police chief, said investigators were working to figure out exactly how the student ingested sodium azide, a toxic chemical commonly used in different areas of research.

“He was in intensive care and was able to communicate with us enough to give us some of the basic information,” Keary said. “The doctors were concerned for his well-being and our ability to talk to him and how that was affecting his well-being, so we only had a limited amount of time and information to get from him.”

The student was working in a lab about 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. Wednesday on the fifth floor of Malott Hall, 1251 Wescoe Hall Drive, the university said. He did not get sick until after he got home.

After learning about the illness around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, KU police evacuated Malott Hall and the connecting Haworth Hall, 1200 Sunnyside Ave., until city fire and university investigators determined that the chemical had not been spilled and that the lab and building were safe for others to occupy. The building was reopened about 5 a.m., Keary said.

The university used its emergency alert system to notify students, faculty and staff by text message and e-mail of the incident before classes began Thursday, said Lynn Bretz, university spokeswoman.

“We didn’t want to have any confusion about whether or not Haworth or Malott halls were safe to enter,” Bretz said. “We didn’t want any confusion about whether or not there had been a chemical spill, so the best way to do that was to be proactive and basically let everybody know.”

Mike Russell, director of the KU Environment Health & Safety office, said the odorless chemical involved in the situation looks like table salt. He said, according to protocol, the chemical should be handled with gloves, under a fume hood and with a laboratory spatula.

“It doesn’t take a lot of this material to cause adverse health reactions,” Russell said. “How much he may or may not have come into contact with, we cannot speculate at this time.”

Keary said no foul play was suspected and that investigators were waiting to talk to the student more to figure out how exactly he ingested the chemical.

“We’re concerned about his health No. 1, getting him healed and back to normal life,” Russell said.

Discussion

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5 November 2009
at 9:51 a.m.

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Vinny1 (Anonymous) says…

Why exactly did this incident require a mass emergency text from KU? Dumb.
5 November 2009
at 10:02 a.m.

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Multidisciplinary (Anonymous) says…

I repeat, do not lay your vegan burrito down on the lab table.
You really don't know your fellow lab students as well as you think you do and accidents do happen.

I thought everyone knew this stuff.

(Did they question the worms?)

All kidding aside,
Sure hope this all turns out okay.
5 November 2009
at 10:11 a.m.

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Bunny_Hotcakes (Anonymous) says…

@Vinny, rumor control is my best guess.

I hope he recovers swiftly. That's scary stuff.
5 November 2009
at 10:11 a.m.

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Cappy (Anonymous) says…

Vin,
For a while the building was evacuated. The notice was for the couple thousand students, faculty, and staff who work and have class there to stay the heck out.

MD,
Speaking as a former lab safety officer, you shouldn't have your burrito in the lab in the first place, let alone setting it on a lab bench. (Mmm, vegan)
5 November 2009
at 10:13 a.m.

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kong (Anonymous) says…

Best wishes for the student.

Sodium azide is the same chemical that poisoned some Harvard lab workers several months ago:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/…
5 November 2009
at 10:13 a.m.

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Irish (Irish Swearingen) says…

I do hope there will be more about this.
“What the long-term health effects may be
Survivors of serious sodium azide poisoning may have heart and brain damage.”
This is very interesting stuff used for such a variety of things from agriculture to explosives.
It is also a preservative used in labs. I just put this in, in case someone did not click on the link.
Hermione mode.
5 November 2009
at 11:03 a.m.

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somedude20 (Anonymous) says…

Maybe he just smoked some K2.

5 November 2009
at 11:22 a.m.

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mom_of_three (Anonymous) says…

I would rather be alerted than not, so I wouldn't worry about what happened at Malott.
5 November 2009
at 11:31 a.m.

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notjustastudent (Anonymous) says…

Text message was a good call- besides the safety thing, there'a nothing more annoying than hauling yourself out of bed, hiking up to campus, only to find a note on the door telling you class is cancelled…
5 November 2009
at 11:36 a.m.

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lounger (Anonymous) says…

I hope the student is o.k.. Maybe this will change procedures.
5 November 2009
at 11:51 a.m.

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Boeing (Anonymous) says…

The text wasn't about staying the heck out; in fact, it specifically said the building was safe to enter…
5 November 2009
at 12:35 p.m.

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mom_of_three (Anonymous) says…

Well, would you want to be in Wescoe, Haworth, Budig or Anschutz and wonder why the Malott was being evacuated? I would worry about why it was being evacuated and if I was safe. The text message system lets everyone know, and it avoids those nasty rumors.
5 November 2009
at 12:38 p.m.

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Pywacket (Anonymous) says…

Vinny~ If anything is dumb, it is your stupefyingly ignorant comment—which you couldn't wait to post until learning more details. What part of “highly dangerous substance” do you not understand? Of course it was appropriate to take preventative action until they ascertained whether or not the stuff had been dropped down a drainpipe, spilled all over the place, or (???).

Okay. You got the first comment in on the thread. Yay for you.

Go change your pants now and try to be a little more restrained next time.
5 November 2009
at 12:41 p.m.

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Multidisciplinary (Anonymous) says…

Cappy, yeah, and that's the mind I was typing with at the time.
Now I wish I hadn't typed at all.
1) No thread for humor, sorry. I just have connections up there and too much lab in my head that went into play as to what they might think.
2) Hope it was an accident and nothing else.
5 November 2009
at 12:46 p.m.

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pace (Anonymous) says…

I hope the student is ok. My prayers for the student, the family and friends.

5 November 2009
at 12:58 p.m.

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Irish (Irish Swearingen) says…

Multi, I thought your comment was very funny and not out of place at all.
Reminds me of those scenes in movies where someone is conducting an autopsy, eating a sandwich and they put it down on top of the corpse.
Hey, it happens, it says so right in Wikipedia.
5 November 2009
at 1:33 p.m.

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Cappy (Anonymous) says…

MD,
Didn't mean to come on too strong. Where I worked dealing in Hazardous Waste once, we would often jibe that the people least qualified to handle dangerous chemicals… are chemists. Seriously, I have seen people eating in labs who know better. You just want to headslap them sometimes.
5 November 2009
at 1:36 p.m.

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gccs14r (Anonymous) says…

Hope it was accidental and not malicious.

I have to say I've used a 50ml beaker to get a drink of water, but the beaker was fresh out of the autoclave and filled directly from the distilled water supply, then put into the dirty glassware area immediately afterward. No way would I grab a random piece of lab glassware to get a drink of water, nor would I segregate a human-contaminated piece of glassware for re-use.
5 November 2009
at 2:02 p.m.

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hawk_chalk (Anonymous) says…

gccs14r- I call BS, even if you did it would be more like a shot instead of a drink. I hope this person gets better, I just wish KU would be in the news more often for good things instead of the ridiculous events that have been happening this year.
5 November 2009
at 2:03 p.m.

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hawk_chalk (Anonymous) says…

Pics or it didn't happen
5 November 2009
at 2:23 p.m.

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alchemist (Anonymous) says…

actually the safety people are wrong. Sodium azide should NOT be handled with a laboratory spatula. Sodium azide can become even more explosive in the presence of metal shavings. Therefore the proper handling of this chemical for weighing would use a teflon spatula or the back end of a glass pipette. The chemical could have been ingested in it's more toxic gaseous form (HN3) if a septum was removed from the flask in which it was formed and the hood was not working properly and caused him to breathe gas/fumes. This is much more likely to occur than eating or drinking in a organic lab. Especially with KU's hoods, which in my experience are more often/broken working inefiiciently than fixed/working correctly. Part of this is due to their attempts to save money by decreasing air flow, and the design of the hoods in general with the large sash rather than the panel sashes more common in industry.
5 November 2009
at 2:49 p.m.

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gccs14r (Anonymous) says…

h_c,

Why would I BS about something like that? I think I did it all of twice, and it was 16-17 years ago. You're right, it's not much water, but boy, was it good.
5 November 2009
at 2:58 p.m.

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Multidisciplinary (Anonymous) says…

No offense taken Cap, thanks. I just know the long hours people put in at school, cramming time for food when they can. Someone walking into a lab with that last bite of food in their hand that they never intend to sit down but finish it, when suddenly they have to, or get distracted and do so, then pick it up again and it picked something up off what seemed to be a perfectly clean counter top.

Or something on the outside of someone's finger that they missed when washing their hands gets into the food at break time in the next room. A grain of something flipped out and got caught under a nail. Might not irritate if they have enough callous.

Those projects with intermittent repetitive procedures, so you have to go back up to the lab for the 11 pm, 3 am, 7 am stirring, the dish flip, the endless readings!
Riding your bike up the hill through the icy and slush in the middle of the night. Joy.

5 November 2009
at 3:28 p.m.

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walleye9898 (Anonymous) says…

Alchemist:

The safety people aren't necessarily wrong related to the spatula. I would agree with you that you shouldn't use a metal spatula due to “potential formation” of metal azides and that teflon or glass would be better. However, in the article line, they didn't quote the safety person (No quotations marks) so we don't know if there was the word “appropriate” ahead of lab spatula.

Related to your middle part about toxic gaseous form, possibility but, if he breathes in toxic gas/fume then it wouldn't be ingestion (your word) but rather inhalation.

If you read the KU release it is “believed” accidental ingestion but not a given. Nothing in any release indicates he was eating or drinking in the lab.

As far as fume hoods, maybe you should talk to the safety folks about the extensive testing and inspection they put each fume hood through on a routine basis to make sure they are working correctly. Panel sashes may or may not be appropriate at all times or the best. I can tell you from my experience all their fume hoods are setup based on safety first and in most instances the hoods tend exhaust too much air which can cause safety problems and also be energy wasters.
5 November 2009
at 4:25 p.m.

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gsxr600 (Anonymous) says…

The building was reopened at 5am…. Do you honestly think any KU student would know about what happened going to class at 8am or even later in the day? Absolutely not. They would find out about it in a press release or in the UDK the next day. Sorry, but this was an accident related to an individual and doesn't have any relation to the whole student body, especially if everything was dealt with at 5am.

Yes I was rudely awoken at 7am this morning for this nonsense.
5 November 2009
at 4:38 p.m.

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Pywacket (Anonymous) says…

Uh…. speaking of breaking news, does it seem odd to anyone else that the LJW still has picked up nothing on the Ft. Hood shooting? Including one of the shooters (there were possibly 3), there are 12 declared dead at the time of this post, with over 30 others injured.

Yes, I've read about it on CNN, but am still surprised that there's nothing here yet—on the “breaking news” banner or if you click on the “national and world” feature, under “news.”

Seems too big a story to ignore for hours, even if the LJW emphasis is on local stuff.

For those who hadn't heard: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/05/texa…

For those of us with a soldier in the family (spouse, parent, adult child, etc.), this is of acute interest, regardless of where our soldier is stationed (or where we think they are at this time).
5 November 2009
at 4:41 p.m.

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Pywacket (Anonymous) says…

PS~ My comments above were posted with no disrespect to the injured KU student in this article. I wish that person a full and speedy recovery.

I just didn't know where else, other than under a “breaking news” story, to post a comment on the Ft Hood massacre, since there is no article here yet.
5 November 2009
at 4:54 p.m.

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Ricky_Vaughn (Anonymous) says…

Vinny wins the “Biggest Jerk of the Day” award.
5 November 2009
at 6:01 p.m.

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hawk_chalk (Anonymous) says…

gccs14r,
Just messing with you, I've heard all kinds of stories from back in the day. Mouth pipettes, smoking every where etc….

I checked some news sources to see if KU made any national headlines only to find out about the tragedy at Ft. Hood- which is not the way I wanted KU to stay out of the headlines.
5 November 2009
at 6:32 p.m.

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Eride (Anonymous) says…

“Cappy (Anonymous) says…

MD,
Didn't mean to come on too strong. Where I worked dealing in Hazardous Waste once, we would often jibe that the people least qualified to handle dangerous chemicals… are chemists. Seriously, I have seen people eating in labs who know better. You just want to headslap them sometimes.”

––––––––––––––––––––––-

So very true.

I think this is fairly common in any profession though. The more comfortable in an environment we get the more careless we can become. I actually have seen someone make the base component of pepper spray without wearing gloves and without decontaminating his hands before leaving the lab… guess what happened to his face minutes later…? :)
5 November 2009
at 7:29 p.m.

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somebodynew (Anonymous) says…

OK, Jkealing - I can't hold back any longer.

First, my thoughts are with the student and his family and friends.

But, Just what are LJW guidlines for “Breaking News” ?? To me this was breaking news this morning, but it has stayed up ALL day as such. Heck, it wasn't even updated since over 2 hours ago. Did you all go to sleep or something???

And yes, why no Breaking News on the Ft. Hood situation??

6 November 2009
at 8:26 a.m.

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KSShy1 (Anonymous) says…

I used to work there. I had an employee that used to go into the lab and rinse out their coffee cup in the lab sink. Then go pour a cup of coffee in it. Sounds harmless…..but could be deadly. This employee was taken aside and counseled. Sometimes people just don't think about the whole picture of what they are doing. We don't know how this student ingested the chemical but pray they will recover fully.