| BOSTON
(Reuters) - A widely-used blue food dye may have contributed
to the deaths of three critically ill patients after it
was used to color the liquid food pumped into their stomachs,
according to a report in Thursday's New England Journal
of Medicine .
The
three had eaten food with FD&C blue dye No. 1 and
their skin and blood turned a bluish-green hours before
they died, Dr. James Maloney of the Medical College of
Wisconsin told Reuters.
A
report on two of three cases originated in Denver and
they are reported in the Journal. The third case will
be presented at a conference in January.
The
dye, made from coal tar, is routinely added to the liquid
to help doctors see if any of the food is escaping from
the stomach and being inhaled. In healthy people, the
dye never leaves the digestive tract.
But
these cases involved patients who had digestive track
tissues being destroyed by sepsis, an infectious condition.
Maloney
and his colleagues said the damage apparently allowed
the dye to get into the bloodstream, causing a deadly
drop in blood pressure and an increase in acid levels
in the body.
One
patient was a 54-year-old woman with heart failure. In
1995, two days after her food was colored with the dye,
her skin and blood turned green and she died.
The
other victim described in the Journal was a one-year-old
boy with sepsis who died in 1998 of the same cause on
the day his skin, blood and urine turned blue.
``Although
both patients had serious underlying illnesses, their
condition was improving before they received the dye and
turned color,'' the researchers said.
The
third case involved an elderly woman from Wisconsin.
Maloney
said there have been other instances, none of them fatal,
where seriously-ill recipients of the dye have turned
color, but the incidents have been sporadic.
The
researcher said the dye is not dangerous to the vast majority
of people. Because it is only in seriously ill patients
that it might be a remote threat, as a precaution, Maloney
said ``we're trying to convince people not to use it in
any hospitalized patients.''
The
dye, manufactured by a variety of companies, was approved
in the 1960s by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
, which performed other safety tests early in the 1980s.
Those experiments showed that the dye was safe and the
body didn't absorb it. But those tests were performed
on healthy animals, the Maloney team noted.
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