Blue powder closes hospital ER
Emergency Management Alert, November 18, 2004
A patient's exposure to a mysterious blue powder shut down a Greenville (SC) hospital's emergency room (ER) last week, Fox News South Carolina reported.
While the blue powder turned out to be neither toxic nor infectious, it took more than nine hours to reopen the ER.
When UPS employee Pete Bartholomew handled a package that leaked blue powder, his chest tightened and his face turned blue. The UPS safety team rushed him to the hospital.
"Nurses quickly sequestered him because he didn't know what the substance was," Marty Lutz, MD, told Fox. "We restricted access in and out of the emergency department."
Bartholomew suffered an allergic reaction to what turned out to be a commercial chemical dye.
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