Bayer fought back with copious advertising, celebrating the brand’s purity just as the epidemic was reaching its peak.Īspirin packages were produced containing no warnings about toxicity and few instructions about use.

In February 1917, Bayer lost its American patent on aspirin, opening a lucrative drug market to many manufacturers. Starko wrote, aspirin overdose stands out for several reasons, including a confluence of historical events. “There was a lot of chaos in these places,” she said, “and I’m not sure if there are good records anywhere.”īut of the many factors that might have influenced the outcome in any particular case, Dr. Starko acknowledged that she did not have autopsy reports or other documents that could prove that aspirin was the problem. At least one contemporary pathologist working for the Public Health Service thought that the amount of lung damage seen during autopsies in early deaths was too little to attribute to viral pneumonia, and that the large amounts of bloody, watery liquid in the lungs must have had some other cause.ĭr. Some doubts were raised even at the time. Starko’s suspicions is that high doses of aspirin, amounts considered unsafe today, were commonly used to treat the illness, and the symptoms of aspirin overdose may have been difficult to distinguish from those of the flu, especially among those who died soon after they became ill.

Starko, author of one of the earliest papers connecting aspirin use with Reye’s syndrome, has published an article suggesting that overdoses of the relatively new “wonder drug” could have been deadly. Now it appears that a small number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin.ĭr. The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more than 50 million people worldwide.

Aspirin poisoning antidote