Monoxide in Small Doses

Everyone knows what happens when a would-be suicide closes the garage door, runs a hose into his car from the tail pipe, and sits inside the car with the engine running. Carbon monoxide, in such heavy doses, is one of the deadliest of gases. It gets into the blood and starves the brain of vital oxygen. The victim turns red and usually dies. But doctors have been arguing for decades about the effects of small doses of monoxide poison over long periods. Only recently have they begun to collect evidence that such small doses may do permanent damage to the brain.

One trouble is that moderate monoxide poisoning produces symptoms so confusing that they baffle the most ingenious and elaborate diagnostic methods. In the New England Journal of Medicine, Yale University Neurologists Gordon J. Gilbert and Gilbert H. Glaser reported the particularly bizarre case of a New Haven traffic cop who sometimes seemed to be "overly jocular and playful" but more often was true to his trade--nervous and irritable. Nearly every afternoon, after several hours on duty, he felt dizzy and sleepy and got the staggers. Sometimes he became unconscious for 15 minutes to 1 1/2 hours.

After a year of these symptoms, the cop took a transfer to the police garage, where he worked as a mechanic. He got no better and wound up in the Yale-New Haven Medical Center, where he soon improved and began gaining weight--only to have a severe relapse after six months back on the job. What helped the doctors clear up his case was the fact that the cop sometimes took a holiday down on the farm, working a tractor that required him to walk behind it. Helped by tractor-engine exhaust, his vacation "cure" gave him the same nervous-system symptoms as he had had in the city: abnormal brain waves, mental dullness, inability to concentrate, and tremor.

Most medical men believe that the body flushes out carbon monoxide quickly after a return to breathing pure air. The Yale neurologists say this may not always be true after repeated exposures, and certainly not for all people: the New Haven cop had a high blood level of monoxide 30 hours after exposure to the fumes. European experiments with lab animals confirm the growing suspicion that leaky stovepipes, rusted-out mufflers, and running a car for even a few minutes inside a garage may involve greater and more subtle dangers than doctors have realized.

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