4. Paralysis. This is the result of peripheral neuritis, localized or generalized. Wrist drop and many other symptoms of local and general paralysis.
TREATMENT. Prevention.—The hands and finger nails of the lead workers should always be thoroughly cleaned before eating. Use respirators if lead is present in the form of dust.
For chronic poisoning remove the cause. Potassium iodide, five to ten grains three times a day. Not to be given in acute cases or when the symptoms are very severe, until what is in the bowels is removed.
Constipation.—For this give a half ounce of epsom salts before breakfast when needed, or repeat in small doses.
For pain.—Heat over the abdomen and give morphine, if necessary.
FOOD POISONING. (Bromototoxismus).—Food may contain the specific organisms of disease, as of tuberculosis or trichinosis; milk and other foods may become infected with typhoid bacilli, and so convey the disease. Animals (or insects or bees) may feed on substances that cause their flesh or products to be poisonous to man. Meat poisoning. Eating sausage or pork pie or headcheese has caused poisoning. Poisoning from impure milk, shell fish, pellagra, from using altered maize, etc.
[INTOXICANTS AND SUN STROKES 375]
Symptoms.—Acute inflammation of stomach and bowels, with great prostration, ending in collapse. In shell fish poisoning, there are numbness, weakness, dilated pupils, rapid and feeble pulse, temperature under the normal and collapse.
Treatment.—In all cases empty the stomach by emetics or stomach tube and the bowels by cathartics. Stimulate if necessary.
HEAT STROKE.—Called also heat exhaustion; thermic fever, coup de Soleil. A condition produced by exposure to excessive heat.