October 23, 2019 • 12 mins
In 1994 the body of a woman who died in a California ER somehow became toxic and sickened 24 people. To this day, no one is sure what happened.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Dave. Let's get to it. No need for further explanation,
let's just start. Let's go today February, thirty one year
old woman brought into a hospital in Riverside, California named
Gloria Ramirez. I like where this is going so far, Chuck,
it's succinct, it's to the point. It was for for
(00:27):
sixty seconds. She had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. But
that's not why she was there. She was brought to
the hospital because her heart was super beating. It was
beating out of her chest such that the chambers were
not filling with blood. That was lowering the volume that
her heart was pumping to the rest of her body,
and her blood pressure was plummeting, and it was very
(00:49):
dangerous and very strange for a thirty one year old woman, right, Um,
But like you said, she had cervical cancer. So they
were like, okay, well, let's just figure this out and
we'll treat her and we'll just life saving measures and
do what we can for And so the e er
staff started working on her like they would any other patient. Um,
but they were unsuccessful in bringing her back. In less
(01:10):
than an hour, she was pronounced dead by the head
of the e R. But it's what took place during
that hour that has created a lasting mystery since February
that remains unsolved to this day because by the time
the head of the e R pronounced Gloria Ramire is dead,
the entire emergency room, all of the patients, and almost
(01:32):
all of the staff had moved out to the parking
lot had evacuated the emergency room because they wanted to
get as far away from Gloria Ramires as absolutely possible. Right, So, uh,
the first thing that happened was they noted that they
drew some blood, and they noticed that the blood smelled
like ammonia, which is not what blood smells like. They
(01:53):
started looking closer and they found these crystals had solidified
within the syringe in the blood. Um. They were called
Manilla crystals. I looked for twenty minutes on what manilla
crystals are and couldn't find it. Well, no, they were
Manila colored crystals. Okay, well that makes sense then, yeah, uh,
she the Mr. Ramirez was she herself was emitting an
(02:16):
odor on her breath. It was they described it as
garlicky and fruity, and then her her body was seemingly
covered in an oily sheen. So so far that's not
too bad or whatever. But the first big problem that
they had, aside from those flex and her her blood
the syringe full of blood, was that the nurse who
(02:37):
had drawn the blood fainted in the er, which is
pretty unusual. But even more unusual is that the nurse
that she handed the syringe too, also fainted, staggered out
of the room, sat down at a nurse's station desk,
and just slumped over dead away. Also super weird. But
it got even weirder. A third nurse and then ultimately
(03:00):
a fourth nurse all fainted um passed out. One of
them started wretching from nausea, all seemingly because of Gloria Ramira.
Something was happening with Gloria Ramirez in her body that
was making the e Er staff sick. And this was
highly unusual, and that's about when they evacuated the e
Er to get everybody as far away from Gloria ramiras
(03:21):
as possible. Yeah, in the end, twenty three of the
thirty seven people on staff in the e R had
at least one odd symptom arranging from tremors to apnea. Uh.
One of them even was an intensive care for two weeks. Pancreatitis,
hepatitis like weird things is like an X Files episode. Basically, Yeah,
(03:43):
that one nurse had all all all of those were
in one nurse. Hepatitis, pancreatites, and something called a vascular necrosis,
which is where the bone becomes starved of oxygen and
starts to die. And this was concentrated on her knees.
This is not supposed to happen when you're just you know,
administering routine life saving measures to somebody who's having atrial fibrillation. Right,
(04:05):
So what they did was they said, let's um seal
the body in a bag. Let's seal that body bag
and an aluminum box, and let's then seal that in
a room until hazmat can get here. Has Matt arrived
that night, and they said, you know, when we go
to check this out, we assume we're going to find
some kind of toxic gas because everyone's getting sick here.
(04:28):
And it got even weirder when they discovered that Gloria
Ramirez was not emitting any kind of toxic gas. Yeah,
they expected to find something like um seward gas, maybe
something coming from the e er and not necessarily Gloria
Ramirez or phosgene gas, which can produce all sorts of
(04:50):
horrible symptoms as well. And they found nothing, not just
on her body, nothing in the bag, nothing in the
box that they sealed her in, nothing in the room.
There was just nothing. And yet she had made twenty
three of the thirty seven emergency room staff sick, so
something had happened. But now they're like, Okay, we've got
a modern medical mystery on our hands. Should we take
(05:13):
a break. I think we should. All right, We'll be
right back, all right. So the has Matt team checks
(05:37):
out Gloria Ramirez. Nothing unusual going on. Not only no
weird gases. Uh, there were no viruses, no bacteria. They
couldn't find any kind of biological source. And so they
said she died of heart failure brought on by kidney failure,
which was brought on by this cancer. But everyone's getting sick,
so they said, we need to up our game here
(05:57):
and bring in uh Quincy. Pretty much, they brought in
someone from Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and they had better equipment,
and they were basically charged with sampling tissue and sampling
blood and finding out just what had happened to her. Yeah,
and so they found a lot of stuff that they
expected to find, but they found three things that stood
(06:19):
out to them. One was A means, which are a
metabolite of ammonia. Another thing called niko tinamedes, which is
a B vitamin that you sometimes find in drugs because
it can produce euphoria and drug dealers will use it
to extend their supply some um. And the third one
is dimethyl sulfone, which is a metabolite of an amino.
(06:41):
Asaid that the body is usually capable of breaking down,
so it was an unusual thing to find even though
it's found in the body, it's usually broken down and
wouldn't have shown up on a test, which means that
there was a lot of dimethyl sulfone in Gloria Ramirez's body. Yeah,
and that's what they honed in on. The A means,
they said, is probably from breaking down from some drug
(07:03):
that we gave her because we were giving her cocktails
of drugs to try and stabilize her. We weren't. But
the e er was the second one. They said, well,
this is quite a leap in my opinion, that suggested
maybe she was using PCP, right, even though they didn't
find any PCP in her system. But at any rate,
they decided to focus on the third one, the dimethyl
(07:24):
sul phone, which uh seemed to make a little bit
more sense than the other two at least, right, and
I mean like it was, it was written off much
less easily than the other two, so it was the
one that was kind of left over. And one of
the researchers that Lawrence Livermore, said, Hey, dimethyl sulfhone. That's
a type of sulfur with a single oxygen bond. But hey,
(07:46):
get this, if you add two oxygen molecules to to
this type of sulfur, you get dimethyl um sulf fox side,
and that's something that people use as like a topical
pain reliever. Maybe Gloria Ramirez was using this dimethyl sulf
ox side as a topical pain reliever, because didn't you
say that her skin was oily, So maybe that's where
(08:08):
it came from. And everyone said, hey, that's great, but
still there's nothing toxic um that could knock out an
entire e er from dimethyl sulfone or dimethyl sul fox
side yes, but they said, oh, some chemical nerds stood up.
He said, but get this. You add four oxygen molecules
and it's just crazy how a couple of molecules can
(08:30):
make something deadly. But you add four and you're gonna
get dimethyl sulfate. And that is if is a substance that,
if it's in gaseous form, can kill you in ten minutes.
And they went, oh, yep, okay, this makes a lot
more sense because there can be a burning sensation, there
can be tissue death and the eyeballs and mucus membranes.
(08:53):
It can lead to paralysis and coma and convulsions, and
suddenly it starts to come into form a little bit right.
Solawrence Livermore went to the corner of Riverside, California, and said,
here's what we think. We can't prove this, but here's
the best theory we've come up with. Gloria Ramirez was
using dimethyl sulfoxide d M s O as a topical
pain reliever for her cervical cancer, and when she was
(09:16):
brought in for heart failure, the paramedics and the e
er staff started flooding her system with oxygen. Well, that
oxygen combined with breaking down dimethyl dimethyl sulf ox side
managed to combine into dimethyl sulfate, and that turned into
some sort of gas that emitted from her that poisoned
(09:37):
the e er staff. And everybody said, okay, good enough,
that's the best anyone to come up with, kind of
I mean, that was a decent theory, but they couldn't
show the exact um pathway that that might have taken
and why her body would have converted that sul phone
into sulfate. It was a good guess, but they couldn't
prove it necessarily, and they still can. It's still unpre
(10:00):
even but some people say, well, this is just like
no one's ever demonstrated how it happened, but this is
probably what happened, say a lot of people. And the
symptoms didn't exactly match because we mentioned some of the
UH doctors and nurses suffered nausea and wretching, and apparently
sulfate doesn't produce those symptoms. And nobody said, my eyes
(10:20):
burned or my mucous membrane burns, which would be like
the primary symptom, and everybody in the room would have
it if one person was affected from being in close
quarters with Gloria Ramirez like that, that's just what would
happen first, And so the symptoms not matching. And then
on top of that, the fact that Gloria Ramires his
family said she never used d M s O kind
(10:42):
of shoots some holes into this theory. So over time,
the fact that this has remained a mystery has allowed
some other ideas to kind of float to the surface too. Yeah,
mass hysteria, which is I think that's just a go
to anytime something happens you can't explain. Yeah, but it
was it was particularly sexist to because they're like, look,
it was mostly female nurses who were subject to this,
(11:03):
so of course it was mass hysteria, right of course. Uh.
And then this one is really interesting to me and
also not true, but an urban legend arose that the
on the hospital staff there were some people smuggling ingredients
for meth amphetamine manufacturing through the E R and I
V bags, so a little breaking bad operation going through there,
(11:24):
and that one of the staff accidentally gave her an
I V bag with these meth amphetamine ingredients and that
produced this toxicity. Ye, pretty interesting stuff. I mean, probably
not the case, but it's still I mean, you can
float interesting ideas like that because it's still not proven. Agreed,
may never be. Well, that's the case of the toxic
(11:47):
corpse of Gloria Ramirez. May she rest in peace? Uh
And since I said may she rest in peace, that
means that this short stuff is over right, Chuck, That's right.
The short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of i Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(12:09):
M hm hm
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Dave. Let's get to it. No need for further explanation,
let's just start. Let's go today February, thirty one year
old woman brought into a hospital in Riverside, California named
Gloria Ramirez. I like where this is going so far, Chuck,
it's succinct, it's to the point. It was for for
(00:27):
sixty seconds. She had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. But
that's not why she was there. She was brought to
the hospital because her heart was super beating. It was
beating out of her chest such that the chambers were
not filling with blood. That was lowering the volume that
her heart was pumping to the rest of her body,
and her blood pressure was plummeting, and it was very
(00:49):
dangerous and very strange for a thirty one year old woman, right, Um,
But like you said, she had cervical cancer. So they
were like, okay, well, let's just figure this out and
we'll treat her and we'll just life saving measures and
do what we can for And so the e er
staff started working on her like they would any other patient. Um,
but they were unsuccessful in bringing her back. In less
(01:10):
than an hour, she was pronounced dead by the head
of the e R. But it's what took place during
that hour that has created a lasting mystery since February
that remains unsolved to this day because by the time
the head of the e R pronounced Gloria Ramire is dead,
the entire emergency room, all of the patients, and almost
(01:32):
all of the staff had moved out to the parking
lot had evacuated the emergency room because they wanted to
get as far away from Gloria Ramires as absolutely possible. Right, So, uh,
the first thing that happened was they noted that they
drew some blood, and they noticed that the blood smelled
like ammonia, which is not what blood smells like. They
(01:53):
started looking closer and they found these crystals had solidified
within the syringe in the blood. Um. They were called
Manilla crystals. I looked for twenty minutes on what manilla
crystals are and couldn't find it. Well, no, they were
Manila colored crystals. Okay, well that makes sense then, yeah, uh,
she the Mr. Ramirez was she herself was emitting an
(02:16):
odor on her breath. It was they described it as
garlicky and fruity, and then her her body was seemingly
covered in an oily sheen. So so far that's not
too bad or whatever. But the first big problem that
they had, aside from those flex and her her blood
the syringe full of blood, was that the nurse who
(02:37):
had drawn the blood fainted in the er, which is
pretty unusual. But even more unusual is that the nurse
that she handed the syringe too, also fainted, staggered out
of the room, sat down at a nurse's station desk,
and just slumped over dead away. Also super weird. But
it got even weirder. A third nurse and then ultimately
(03:00):
a fourth nurse all fainted um passed out. One of
them started wretching from nausea, all seemingly because of Gloria Ramira.
Something was happening with Gloria Ramirez in her body that
was making the e Er staff sick. And this was
highly unusual, and that's about when they evacuated the e
Er to get everybody as far away from Gloria ramiras
(03:21):
as possible. Yeah, in the end, twenty three of the
thirty seven people on staff in the e R had
at least one odd symptom arranging from tremors to apnea. Uh.
One of them even was an intensive care for two weeks. Pancreatitis,
hepatitis like weird things is like an X Files episode. Basically, Yeah,
(03:43):
that one nurse had all all all of those were
in one nurse. Hepatitis, pancreatites, and something called a vascular necrosis,
which is where the bone becomes starved of oxygen and
starts to die. And this was concentrated on her knees.
This is not supposed to happen when you're just you know,
administering routine life saving measures to somebody who's having atrial fibrillation. Right,
(04:05):
So what they did was they said, let's um seal
the body in a bag. Let's seal that body bag
and an aluminum box, and let's then seal that in
a room until hazmat can get here. Has Matt arrived
that night, and they said, you know, when we go
to check this out, we assume we're going to find
some kind of toxic gas because everyone's getting sick here.
(04:28):
And it got even weirder when they discovered that Gloria
Ramirez was not emitting any kind of toxic gas. Yeah,
they expected to find something like um seward gas, maybe
something coming from the e er and not necessarily Gloria
Ramirez or phosgene gas, which can produce all sorts of
(04:50):
horrible symptoms as well. And they found nothing, not just
on her body, nothing in the bag, nothing in the
box that they sealed her in, nothing in the room.
There was just nothing. And yet she had made twenty
three of the thirty seven emergency room staff sick, so
something had happened. But now they're like, Okay, we've got
a modern medical mystery on our hands. Should we take
(05:13):
a break. I think we should. All right, We'll be
right back, all right. So the has Matt team checks
(05:37):
out Gloria Ramirez. Nothing unusual going on. Not only no
weird gases. Uh, there were no viruses, no bacteria. They
couldn't find any kind of biological source. And so they
said she died of heart failure brought on by kidney failure,
which was brought on by this cancer. But everyone's getting sick,
so they said, we need to up our game here
(05:57):
and bring in uh Quincy. Pretty much, they brought in
someone from Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and they had better equipment,
and they were basically charged with sampling tissue and sampling
blood and finding out just what had happened to her. Yeah,
and so they found a lot of stuff that they
expected to find, but they found three things that stood
(06:19):
out to them. One was A means, which are a
metabolite of ammonia. Another thing called niko tinamedes, which is
a B vitamin that you sometimes find in drugs because
it can produce euphoria and drug dealers will use it
to extend their supply some um. And the third one
is dimethyl sulfone, which is a metabolite of an amino.
(06:41):
Asaid that the body is usually capable of breaking down,
so it was an unusual thing to find even though
it's found in the body, it's usually broken down and
wouldn't have shown up on a test, which means that
there was a lot of dimethyl sulfone in Gloria Ramirez's body. Yeah,
and that's what they honed in on. The A means,
they said, is probably from breaking down from some drug
(07:03):
that we gave her because we were giving her cocktails
of drugs to try and stabilize her. We weren't. But
the e er was the second one. They said, well,
this is quite a leap in my opinion, that suggested
maybe she was using PCP, right, even though they didn't
find any PCP in her system. But at any rate,
they decided to focus on the third one, the dimethyl
(07:24):
sul phone, which uh seemed to make a little bit
more sense than the other two at least, right, and
I mean like it was, it was written off much
less easily than the other two, so it was the
one that was kind of left over. And one of
the researchers that Lawrence Livermore, said, Hey, dimethyl sulfhone. That's
a type of sulfur with a single oxygen bond. But hey,
(07:46):
get this, if you add two oxygen molecules to to
this type of sulfur, you get dimethyl um sulf fox side,
and that's something that people use as like a topical
pain reliever. Maybe Gloria Ramirez was using this dimethyl sulf
ox side as a topical pain reliever, because didn't you
say that her skin was oily, So maybe that's where
(08:08):
it came from. And everyone said, hey, that's great, but
still there's nothing toxic um that could knock out an
entire e er from dimethyl sulfone or dimethyl sul fox
side yes, but they said, oh, some chemical nerds stood up.
He said, but get this. You add four oxygen molecules
and it's just crazy how a couple of molecules can
(08:30):
make something deadly. But you add four and you're gonna
get dimethyl sulfate. And that is if is a substance that,
if it's in gaseous form, can kill you in ten minutes.
And they went, oh, yep, okay, this makes a lot
more sense because there can be a burning sensation, there
can be tissue death and the eyeballs and mucus membranes.
(08:53):
It can lead to paralysis and coma and convulsions, and
suddenly it starts to come into form a little bit right.
Solawrence Livermore went to the corner of Riverside, California, and said,
here's what we think. We can't prove this, but here's
the best theory we've come up with. Gloria Ramirez was
using dimethyl sulfoxide d M s O as a topical
pain reliever for her cervical cancer, and when she was
(09:16):
brought in for heart failure, the paramedics and the e
er staff started flooding her system with oxygen. Well, that
oxygen combined with breaking down dimethyl dimethyl sulf ox side
managed to combine into dimethyl sulfate, and that turned into
some sort of gas that emitted from her that poisoned
(09:37):
the e er staff. And everybody said, okay, good enough,
that's the best anyone to come up with, kind of
I mean, that was a decent theory, but they couldn't
show the exact um pathway that that might have taken
and why her body would have converted that sul phone
into sulfate. It was a good guess, but they couldn't
prove it necessarily, and they still can. It's still unpre
(10:00):
even but some people say, well, this is just like
no one's ever demonstrated how it happened, but this is
probably what happened, say a lot of people. And the
symptoms didn't exactly match because we mentioned some of the
UH doctors and nurses suffered nausea and wretching, and apparently
sulfate doesn't produce those symptoms. And nobody said, my eyes
(10:20):
burned or my mucous membrane burns, which would be like
the primary symptom, and everybody in the room would have
it if one person was affected from being in close
quarters with Gloria Ramirez like that, that's just what would
happen first, And so the symptoms not matching. And then
on top of that, the fact that Gloria Ramires his
family said she never used d M s O kind
(10:42):
of shoots some holes into this theory. So over time,
the fact that this has remained a mystery has allowed
some other ideas to kind of float to the surface too. Yeah,
mass hysteria, which is I think that's just a go
to anytime something happens you can't explain. Yeah, but it
was it was particularly sexist to because they're like, look,
it was mostly female nurses who were subject to this,
(11:03):
so of course it was mass hysteria, right of course. Uh.
And then this one is really interesting to me and
also not true, but an urban legend arose that the
on the hospital staff there were some people smuggling ingredients
for meth amphetamine manufacturing through the E R and I
V bags, so a little breaking bad operation going through there,
(11:24):
and that one of the staff accidentally gave her an
I V bag with these meth amphetamine ingredients and that
produced this toxicity. Ye, pretty interesting stuff. I mean, probably
not the case, but it's still I mean, you can
float interesting ideas like that because it's still not proven. Agreed,
may never be. Well, that's the case of the toxic
(11:47):
corpse of Gloria Ramirez. May she rest in peace? Uh
And since I said may she rest in peace, that
means that this short stuff is over right, Chuck, That's right.
The short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of i Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(12:09):
M hm hm
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