Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren voc obamb Here, do you have brown lines crow's feet? Now you can make them disappear with the blink of a injection. Botox has become a popular cosmetic treatment, and while it's pretty common knowledge at this point that botox works thanks to a carefully controlled toxin, what's less well known is that we know about that toxin thanks to a batch of killer sausages. In the early eighteen hundreds.
It was this perfectly poisonous tube pork medley, that justin Is Kerner, a German physician, first suspected as the source of the potentially deadly muscle relaxing botulinum toxin. Sausage of questionable freshness was not uncommon in turn of the nineteenth century Germany, but after mysterious outbreaks of sausage poisoning during the Napoleonic Wars repeatedly killed scores of people, Kerner got
wise to the cause. After rigorous testing of hundreds of sausages and of injections of the suspected toxin, he became the first to identify and publish a clinical description of the toxin and its effects. Food born Botulism is caused when the things we eat are infected with spores of Claustrodium botulinum microbes, a nearly bulletproof bacteria commonly found in
soil around the globe. When the microbe contaminates meat and occasionally produced, it flourishes provided the environment is oxygen depleted. This makes it the perfect deadly pairing with poorly preserved foods and salted meats. Boche Linum toxin in the wild can cause vision problems, difficulties swallowing, vomiting, and severely weakened muscles, but people are so resourceful that they've figured out a way to harness the toxin and focus its effects in
specific ways. Case in point the popularity of a wrinkle rasing serum known by the brand name Botox, the use of which has jumped by more than seven percent since the year two thousand, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, and this increase only reflects cosmetic use. Bochuallinum toxin is quite useful for a range of medical maladies, including excessive sweating and migraines, and it can also relax the perpetually contracted muscles of people who have cerebral palsy.
The art of looking good, just like bochuainum toxin, has a long and dubious history. Ancient Egyptians painted their eyelids with a toxic cocktail of copper or in lead, and the exposure lead to insomnia and brain damage. Greeks smeared their faces with a lead based cream, which eventually caused madness. Going to these great lengths may seem a bit ridiculous, especially when one considers sacrificing health for beauty, but it's
not as far removed as you may think. We still use mercury in some eye cosmetics as a preservative, all though some states have banned the element, and in the year two thousand, one third of thirty three red lipsticks examined by a Safe Cosmetics advocacy group were found to contain lead. As of twenty sixteen, the US Food and Drug Administration doesn't have a set limit for lead in cosmetics.
We do, you have a set of standards for commercial cure to meat production, however, making most cases of bachulinum toxin poisoning a thing of the past. Though, just to be safe, avoid any canned food that's bulging outward or that has a dent along one of the cans, seems, and don't give honey to babies under one year of age. Yep, that is a batual is M safety precaution to Today's episode was written by Laurie L. Dove and produced by
Tristan McNeil and Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other tight topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com