07:33 – I see that other drugs sold by NECC are now suspected of harming patients to whom they were administered.
Yesterday, I was making up a liter of 0.5% aqueous eosin Y stain. I tapped out about 5 grams of the stain into a tared beaker sitting on the scale. I actually ended up with 5.23 grams in the beaker. Close enough. I added 800 mL or so of hot water to the beaker, stirred to dissolve the powder, transferred the solution to a rinsed-out one liter soda bottle, and brought the volume up to one liter. Because fungus tends to grow in a plain eosin Y solution, I added a small spatula spoon of thymol crystals as a preservative, capped the bottle, swirled to dissolve the thymol, and set the bottle aside.
As I was doing all that, it occurred to me that that stain solution, not intended for human consumption and made up without using aseptic procedures and with no attempt to maintain sterility, was probably actually safer for human consumption than the products made by NECC. At least I added a preservative to prevent fungus growth. How pathetic is that?
If the news reports are to be believed, NECC produced products that they marketed as suitable for injection into humans, and they did so without following even basic aseptic precautions. If that’s in fact true, the owners and managers of that business should be facing serious prison time. So far, 15 people have died as a direct result of being injected with those products, and some 15,000 others are at risk. That may not qualify legally as first-degree murder, but it must certainly qualify as reckless homicide.
12:01 – I just spotted Heather, Amy’s step-mom, while I was out walking Colin. I told Heather that Barbara and I really didn’t want any magazines, but we wanted to support Amy. I asked if we could just donate cash to the school fundraiser, and Heather said sure. So I handed her a $20 bill.
I actually almost handed Amy some cash when she rang our doorbell selling magazines. Fortunately, I remembered what happened with Jasmine. On her birthday, maybe her 15th or 16th, I tried to give Jas $20 to buy herself some iTunes tracks or something. She thanked me, but said she wasn’t allowed to accept money from men. Ruh-roh. It never even occurred to me that that might be a problem. I talked to Kim later. She said she trusted me and had no problem with me giving Jas cash for her birthday, but Mary, Jas’s grandmother, had a big problem with any man, including family members, doing so. And, sad to say, I think Mary is right. What a world we live in.
16:33 – I just made up a liter of methyl cellulose solution. Well, actually, it’s still a suspension, but it’ll soon be a solution. Methyl cellulose has an interesting property. It’s soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water.
You might think I could make up a solution by stirring methyl cellulose powder into cold water. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. Methyl cellulose has high surface tension, which means water has a hard time wetting it. Trying to stir the powder into cold water produces globules of methyl cellulose that have slimy wet outer surfaces and dry methyl cellulose powder inside. It makes a real mess. So the trick is to stir the methyl cellulose powder into very hot water. The hot water doesn’t dissolve the powder, but stirring disperses it into a suspension of fine powder. Cooling that liquid suspension in an ice bath or the freezer allows the methyl cellulose to go into solution without clumping. So I have a liter sitting in the freezer as I write this.