送交者: yuan 于 March 07, 2002 11:08:58:
回答: 关于朱令讨论的综合报道 由 松鼠 于 March 07, 2002 10:53:06:
Name: John W. Aldis, M.D.
Title:
E-mail: jwaldis@email.msn.com
Subject: Visited Zhuling in October 2000
Contents:
In October I visited Beijing and met with
everybody
there on the case.
Zhu Lin remains severely neurologically disabled from her prolonged and
intense exposure to the thallium. While most thallium poisoning cases
recover completely, her case was special because of the long delay in
making
the diagnosis.
She spends most of her time in a hospital because she needs some
pulmonary
support. (The nerves going to her diaphragm were evidently damaged
during
her hospitalization.) She is nearly blind and cannot speak.
Nevertheless,
there are glimmers of wakefulness in her mind that remind us that she
is
still a very remarkable person.
Just a couple of days ago, her mother wrote me a note saying that the
courts
had finally awarded Zhu Lin a settlement against the hospital where she
was
being treated at the time of the contact with the Internet. The amount
of
money is not very much (certainly not enough to provide her the care
she
needs), it was a small victory in a long and tragic story.
Yes, there was a very strong suspect in the case. ...
Zhu Lin's case is more of an example of how things "might have been" if
the
Internet had been used the way it should have been used. E-mail is all
over
China now, including in the hospital where she was being treated. But
every
step of the process then was tedious and even dangerous. The cultural,
economic, linguistic, and medical hurdles were actually accentuated by
the
rapid communications provided for by the Internet. Over time things
have
and will continue to improve -- but too late for Zhu Lin.
Not very long after her case broke in the Chinese press, a young female
student at another university was treated for a suspicious illness.
She
recovered spontaneously without a diagnosis. Then not long after that,
a
male student was brought to the hospital with similar symptoms --
accompanied by his "boyfriend" who informed the staff of that the
dosage the
boy had received was under the lethal dose -- and that that "the
treatment
is Prussian blue." Checking back on the first case, it seems that the
girl
and boy had been poisoned out of jealously by the second young boy.
A little while later a Chinese dissident lady in Palo Alto, CA, was
brought
to the hospital complaining of strange abdominal pains and pain in her
extremities. She was pulling out her hair. Her symptoms appeared
quite
functional and she was admitted to a psychiatric ward. A Chinese
doctor in
the community had seen Zhu Lin's case discussed in the local
(California)
Chinese press, and he suggested they check the lady for thallium. The
test
confirmed the diagnosis. Her new husband then fled back to Beijing.
As I
understand it, he was a doctor at the same hospital where Zhu Lin was
hospitalized!
These (and other) amazing "copy cat" cases are one more aspect of the
amazing and tragic story of Zhu Lin.
John W. Aldis, M.D.
AAFP, MPH & Tropical Medicine
Jakarta, Indonesia
jwaldis@email.msn.com
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