TreasureKY
Posts: 3032
Joined: 4/10/2007 From: Kentucky Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GreedyTop do I HAVE to be nice? *many hugs to you both* I suspect you're nice even when you aren't nice. *many hugs in return* Doing a small bit of further research, I find this whole thing to be a problem with media sensationalism and poor journalism. An article published by US News & World Report on June 1, 2010 has the headline: Contaminated Cocaine Can Cause Flesh to Rot It leads with the following paragraph: Cocaine abusers -- already at risk for an abnormal heartbeat, blood pressure problems, hallucinations, convulsions and stroke -- can add another potential health complication to the list: rotting flesh. The article refers to a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine where doctors at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York hypothesize that cocaine contaminated with levamisole may cause not only neutropenia (agranulocytosis) but also vasculitis after two patients (both cocaine abusers) had similar cases. Vasculitis (vas-kyu-LI-tis) is a condition that involves inflammation in the blood vessels. Some kinds of vasculitis can lead to tissue necrosis, but that is not a foregone conclusion. The USN&WR article quotes one of the authoring physicians as saying - "The drug may induce an immunological reaction producing inflammation or vasculitis, an inflammation inside the small blood vessels," Dumyati said in explaining the link to tissue death. "The result can be the death of the epidermis or outer layer of skin." That the reporter for US News & World Report decided to use the words, "rotting flesh", to describe the condition appears to be a a misleading case of oversimplification. As well, she changed the physicians' "hypothesis" to a conclusion in her article. All in all, I'd say this was a case of poor journalism. That further articles (like the one linked by the OP) mutated "rotting flesh" into "flesh eating disease", is just sensationalism.
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