Birmingham medics finds clue to Iraq poisonings

Mar 7 2008 By Alison Dayani, Health Correspondent

MEDICS at a Birmingham hospital have helped save the lives of two poisoned Iraqi families.

Toxicology laboratory workers at City Hospital, in Winson Green, carried out tests for the World Health Organisation after two children died and relatives became seriously ill in Baghdad.

Their results found that cake two Iraqi officials and their families had eaten was laced with thallium - a heavy metal often used by the former Saddam Hussein regime to get rid of opponents.

Medics in Iraq could then successfully treat the rest of the family, who survived the thallium poisoning, the first since the dictator's overthrow.

The cake had been delivered to an air force club in Baghdad shortly before the patients were taken ill last month. It is due to close working relations between Dr Allister Vale, head of The West Midlands Poisons Unit at City Hospital, and the World Health Organisation that the hospital has become involved in international work.

Before Christmas, the laboratory was involved with detecting a case of bromide poisoning in Angola, in sosuth-west Africa, where black market table salt was being sold bulked out with bromide salt.