On January 7, 2022, Meng Meng, an 18-year-old girl in Xingtai City, Hebei Province, underwent a double lung transplant.
Half a month ago, after Meng Meng's uncle diluted the herbicide in the house with water, he falsely claimed that it was a medicine for treating colds, and let Meng Meng take it twice, causing Meng Meng to be poisoned. Later, the hospital measured paraquat with a concentration of 70 ng/ml in the cute urine.
Speaking of paraquat, most people in the pre-Internet era are no strangers, in addition to its own "weeding field", we can also see it in many cases of "passion to take poison".
Paraquat, also known as ballali, is a bipyridine heterocyclic compound, a rapidly exterminating herbicide. In order to prevent accidental accidental ingestion, warning colors, odorants and emetics are often added in production, which have obvious pungent odors.
There is a line in the movie "Big Fish and Begonias": "You meet a person, you make a mistake, you want to make up for it, you want to pay it off." In the end, you find that you are powerless to go back to heaven. "After drinking paraquat, it is this feeling that the process of chronic death will give the user a lot of time to regret it.
After high doses of paraquat are mistakenly taken, there are symptoms of acute poisoning in the short term – burning pain in the digestive system, accompanied by nausea and vomiting, perforation bleeding of the digestive tract, and impaired liver function. After being sent to the hospital in time, the hospital will give the stomach wash of the wrong person to reduce blood absorption and carry out in vitro blood purification. Properly handled, those who mistakenly take it can generally stabilize the disease in the acute phase.
But the effects of paraquat are far from over...
When a person eats or absorbs paraquat, the lungs die like plants and cannot regenerate. Paraquat's bipyridine heterocyclic compounds are slowly absorbed by lung tissue, causing extensive damage to lung capillaries and venole endothelial cells and entering a proliferative phase that initiates the pulmonary fibrosis mechanism to gradually form a honeycomb lung, a process that is irreversible.
Pulmonary fibrosis refers to the massive destruction of alveoli and lung parenchymal tissue into extracellular matrix deposits and hypertrophic fibroblasts that cannot be used for respiration. Patients with pulmonary fibrosis, despite gulping and panting heavily, still struggle to get enough oxygen because the lungs cannot exchange blood and oxygen, and oxygen can enter the lungs but not the bloodstream.
Once a patient has pulmonary fibrosis, the condition is difficult to reverse. Most patients poisoned with paraquat die from respiratory failure or acute respiratory distress syndrome.
The only way to treat it is through lung transplantation.
Paraquat was first invented in 1914, and its use in China increased rapidly after it entered China in 1984. Paraquat has excellent weed control effects, while passivating the soil, with minimal pollution, does not harm plant rhizomes, and does not cause pesticide residues in the soil and plants. Therefore, it is very popular with the market. However, paraquat used domestically at that time was imported and its scope of application was relatively small.
In 1996, Li Dejun, the father of paraquat in China, began to engage in paraquat technology research, and in 2004, he mastered the production technology of paraquat, making the mainland the second country to master the technology. With the localization of paraquat, paraquat's domestic appearance rate has also increased. In addition to its brilliance in agricultural production, paraquat is also forced to "participate" in many love-hate and impulsive impulses.
Between 1991 and 2000, there were about 450 cases of paraquat poisoning in China, while nearly 8,000 suicides of paraquat were publicly reported between 2001 and 2008. As the use of paraquat has surged, so have suicides taking paraquat.
Li Dejun mentioned this in an interview in 2018: "There is no antidote, but I don't attach great importance to this because it is not for people to drink." I also didn't expect that this product would be actively drunk. ”
In order to avoid accidental ingestion, paraquat is produced in accordance with national standards for pesticide products and mandates three lines of defence: dyeing, odorants and emetics. In the interview, Li Dejun said: "Paraquat is a work that I am very proud of, I did not expect such a proud work to have such a serious flaw, let me feel that there is a sense of guilt when it is not good, and I am ashamed of this problem." ”
Paraquat is a direct or indirect cause of numerous tragedies, as paraquat has no specific antidote and the mortality rate from oral poisoning is extremely high. It has been banned or strictly restricted in more than 20 countries and regions. Since July 1, 2014, the mainland has revoked the registration and production license of paraquat water agents, stopped production, retained the registration of export of water agents of parent drug manufacturers, allowed exclusive export production, and stopped the sale and use of water agents in China on July 1, 2016. The paraquat soluble agent registration certificate expired on September 25, 2018, and the domestic use registration will no longer be approved, and the sale and use of paraquat soluble agent in China will be prohibited from September 26, 2020.
Although Meng Meng, who was cruelly fed paraquat by her uncle, waited for a suitable donor and underwent lung transplantation, she still faces the impact of prognosis rejection and lung infection in the future. Dr. Chen Jingyu, who underwent surgery, said that (Meng Meng) may need to take anti-evasive drugs for a long time after that.
In response to netizens' doubts about the survival rate of lung transplant patients after paraquat poisoning, on January 11, Chen Jingyu said that in recent years, the number of patients who have survived for more than 10 years has increased. Chen Jingyu also disclosed that this kind of surgery is a "race against time", "as long as the donor is taken down and sent to the plane, the patient must be in the operating room, all the preparations in the operating room are done, basically the plane flies to the hospital for more than half of the time, and the patient's chest cavity is opened." After opening the diseased lung, we cut off the sick lung, and when the lung source reaches the operating room, we do some pruning of the donor's lung, and directly complete the transplant. ”
Edit: Ge Ge Wu