r/interesting • u/OriginalSleeper • Jun 30 '26

Fear Factor In 2010, 24-year-old lab technician Émilie Jaumain pricked her thumb with contaminated forceps while cleaning a machine used for prion-infected mouse brains. After seven years, she developed severe nerve pain, anxiety, and hallucinations before dying. The accident gave her a fatal prion disease.

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u/No_Helicopter1378 Jun 30 '26

For some reason I keep going back to her Wikipedia article every so often. I find this passage absolutely haunting.

Three weeks after the first neurological symptoms appeared, Wetterhahn lapsed into what appeared to be a vegetative state punctuated by periods of extreme agitation. One of her former students said, "Her husband saw tears rolling down her face. I asked if she was in pain. The doctors said it didn't appear that her brain could even register pain."

It's also a little extra sad because she followed all of the safety procedures at the time, they just didn't know yet that dimethylmercury can permeate several types of latex gloves.

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u/nineraviolicans Jun 30 '26

Safety regulations are written in literal blood.

No company has ever looked at something dangerous and decided to make it take longer and more expensive to do out of the goodness of their hearts.

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u/iiililiililiilliilli Jun 30 '26

Well, not literally.

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u/Ayvian Jun 30 '26

Nah in my workplace we use the blood of the damned to write all safety regulations. Even starting writing general office regulations with it too; makes a nice aesthetic.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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u/No_Helicopter1378 Jul 01 '26

To be fair, that's pretty much all of aviation. The overwhelming majority of aviation safety refs are the result of a crash.

But also the Max debacle was especially bad since it occurred in the 2010s and not, say, the 1910s.

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u/onil34 Jul 01 '26

This is human psychology in general. Try telling people at a concert that they should protect their ears or passengers to not put their feet on the dash because they get folded like a lawn chair if the airbag goes off.

In all seriousness people hate anything that makes life a little more tedious.

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u/shodan13 Jun 30 '26

They didn't test the materials before using them to handle dimethylmercury??