Was it Mr. Mouse in the Lab with the Poison?

What started out as a routine coffee break with two other coworkers ended in a trip to the hospital for Matteo Iannacone, MD, an immunology researcher in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. It only took one sip of espresso before Iannacone felt dizzy and began to sweat. “I had to sit down,” he says. 

And for good reason. Iannacone and five others who consumed coffee that day from the single-serve machine on the eighth floor of Harvard Medical School’s New Research Building were poisoned. The culprit: sodium azide, a common laboratory item that’s best known, according to the CDC, as the chemical in car airbags.

News of the incident quickly spread after Harvard released an internal memo last Friday confirming that, “While we do not yet know how the incident occurred, we have recently learned that sodium azide…was present in the coffee consumed by the six employees.” The memo, obtained by the Boston Herald, came out nearly two months after the Wednesday, August 26th poisonings.

“I don’t think it was an accident,” Iannacone told Applied Clinical Trials, an inkling shared by others, including a toxicologist not involved with the case. However, as for who did it and why, Iannacone says he has no idea, and so far Harvard has not disciplined anyone and doesn’t appear to consider the incident an assault.

Which might be a mistake. Lacing coffee or tea with sodium azide is not unheard of. In a span of three months, Japan reported three cases of such poisoning at three different medical/scientific institutions back in 1998. In one case, the crime scene was next door to clinical research labs that freely stored sodium azide.

Something else Harvard might want to consider are statistics on assault in the workplace. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reports there were 839 workplace assaults or violent acts in 2007. And while none likely occurred at a laboratory on an Ivy League campus, the September murder of Yale graduate student Annie Le did.

In the end, not treating what happened at Harvard as an assault but rather an accident might prove astute. If the Boston police department isn’t investigating the case, then there’s no case to solve, right? Plus it’s happened before. In the early 1980s a lab tech accidentally poisoned her coworkers when she filled a kettle with distilled water that had been treated with sodium azide.     

Even so, Harvard is playing it safe. Plans are in place to install new surveillance cameras and tighten building security.     

As for Iannacone, it’s work as usual sans the eighth floor espresso machine. “I’m a little bit concerned about what happened,” he says, “but there’s nothing I can do.” Apparently he’s not the suspicious type.