Please don't make me eat thallium.
If you're an average normal person and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates
from the trash, you'd probably take Rover to the vet. If you're a vet and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates, you start taking notes---and blood and hair samples too. That's the backstory to a recent paper
published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation. A poor, overly curious one-year-old shepherd mix broke into the laboratory trash and gobbled up 15 agar plates containing thallium
. The poisonous compound is used in labs to isolate Mycoplasma fungi
because it pretty much kills everything else that could grow on agar. Known as "the poisoner's poison," thallium has also been implicated in a number of famous murders
and was a favorite of Saddam Hussein. (So if you are a non-scientist with thallium in your trash, it is kind of suspect...) The dog's owner, ...
