Scientists putting the lethal ‘zombie powder’ to new uses

Press, 10 September 1985, Page 13

Scientists putting the lethal ‘zombie powder’ to new uses

Tetrodotoxin, a lethal poison that kills gourmets in Japan and has been linked with zombies in Haiti, may one day help doctors save lives. “We’re looking for something that can drop a patient’s temperature and blood pressure during brain surgery,” says Dr John D. Hartung, assistant professor of anesthesiology at Downstate Medical Centre in Brooklyn and one of the few people in the world studying the poison. Preliminary experiments indicate that tetrodotoxin does both, says Dr Hartung. “It’s an exciting prospect, because if. a patient s temperature and blood pressure could be lowered substantially just for a few minutes, in effect turning off the brain and putting him in suspended animation, it would open the way for incredible new surgical techniques.” In non-fatal doses, tetrodotoxin can lower the metabolism so much that a person seems more dead than alive. So-called zombies suffer the same fate, says Wade Davis, a botanist affiliated with Harvard University’s botanical museum. He has been studying the zombie phenomenon in Haiti for the last three years. According to Dr Davis, zombies are not malevolent creatures who rise from the grave to torment the living. Rather, they are people who have been given small doses of tetrodotoxin, which makes them appear to be dead. After burial, they are resuscitated by voodoo sorcerers. The sorcerers have to be good pharmacologists to administer just the right amount of tetrodotoxin, which is 275 times deadlier than cyanide. Just a milligram, about the amount that could be put on the head of a pin, could kill a person. In Japan, the substance has killed almost 200 people in the last 10 years. All of them died from eating puffer fish, a delicacy which contains the poison. All five samples of “zombie

powder” that Dr Davis collected in Haiti had traces of tetrodotoxin obtained from dried puffer fish. He speculates that the potions, which also contain pulverised human bones, are prepared and administered by the sorcerers to punish people for crimes or transgressions

against their secret codes. He is sure the powder works. One of the samples has been tried on a monkey in a research laboratory in the United States. The normally aggressive animal retreated to the back of its cage and stayed there for nine hours

without moving. It appeared to be dead, but eventually recovered fully. Voodoo sorcerers rub the powder against a wound in the victim’s flesh; it enters his bloodstream and puts him into a similar deathlike state. He cannot speak or move,

but can still hear and think. Assumed dead, he is buried alive, but later retrieved from the coffin by the sorcerer and his helpers, who

revive him with a beating and a strong dose of a drug extracted from a plant known as the “zombie cucumber.” “A person is not randomly handed over to a secret society for punishment,” says Dr Davis. “He’s only turned into a zombie after being judged guilty of violations of the society’s code, so it’s utterly wrong to view the phenomenon of zombies in the context of Hollywood pictures.” As Dr Davis sees it, the secret societies represent a kind of parallel government that operates independently of the official one. The societies have their own systems of social welfare, justice, and voodoo religious beliefs. Clairvius Narcisse, who Davis thinks is the first medically authenticated zombie, ran foul of his society by not fulfilling family obligations and by trying to take some land that did not belong to him.

In what Dr Davis considers a classic zombie scenario, Narcisse suddenly fell ill. After lingering a few days, he was declared dead by two attending physicians, one of them an American associated with the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti.

Narcisse was buried in the presence of his entire village. Then, 17 years later, he turned up in a small rural market town, where he was identified by a niece. Narcisse claims he can remember hearing people crying at his funeral, the nails being driven into his coffin, and then being buried. That night, he says, a voodoo sorcerer dug him up and led him to a plantation, from which he eventually escaped. All the facts surrounding Narcisse’s death have been checked and rechecked by authorities, says Dr Davis. He is convinced that Narcisse is telling the truth.

By

DONALD FREDERICK,

Geographic News Service

National