BOSTON (Reuters)
- A widely-used blue food dye may have contributed to the deaths
of three critically ill patients after it was used to color the
liquid food pumped into their stomachs, according to a report
in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine .
The three
had eaten food with FD&C blue dye No. 1 and their skin and
blood turned a bluish-green hours before they died, Dr. James
Maloney of the Medical College of Wisconsin told Reuters.
A report on
two of three cases originated in Denver and they are reported
in the Journal. The third case will be presented at a conference
in January.
The dye, made
from coal tar, is routinely added to the liquid to help doctors
see if any of the food is escaping from the stomach and being
inhaled. In healthy people, the dye never leaves the digestive
tract.
But these
cases involved patients who had digestive track tissues being
destroyed by sepsis, an infectious condition.
Maloney and
his colleagues said the damage apparently allowed the dye to get
into the bloodstream, causing a deadly drop in blood pressure
and an increase in acid levels in the body.
One patient
was a 54-year-old woman with heart failure. In 1995, two days
after her food was colored with the dye, her skin and blood turned
green and she died.
The other
victim described in the Journal was a one-year-old boy with sepsis
who died in 1998 of the same cause on the day his skin, blood
and urine turned blue.
``Although
both patients had serious underlying illnesses, their condition
was improving before they received the dye and turned color,''
the researchers said.
The third
case involved an elderly woman from Wisconsin.
Maloney said
there have been other instances, none of them fatal, where seriously-ill
recipients of the dye have turned color, but the incidents have
been sporadic.
The researcher
said the dye is not dangerous to the vast majority of people.
Because it is only in seriously ill patients that it might be
a remote threat, as a precaution, Maloney said ``we're trying
to convince people not to use it in any hospitalized patients.''
The dye, manufactured
by a variety of companies, was approved in the 1960s by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration , which performed other safety tests
early in the 1980s. Those experiments showed that the dye was
safe and the body didn't absorb it. But those tests were performed
on healthy animals, the Maloney team noted.
|
