Psychiatric Survey of a Random Sample of Skin Out-patients

handling solutions of this substance is advised, because it can produce a severe dermatitis. Biochemically, pentachlorophenol resembles the dinitrophenols in its action on metabolism by inhibiting phosphorylating processes and allowing oxidative reactions to proceed more rapidly. From Germany comes a report of severe sciatic pain and neuritis and associated skin eruptions occurring in eight persons working with pentachlorophenol. The symptoms and signs were in the legs, but otherwise closely resembled those in the upper limbs of the cases described above. Animals poisoned with pentachlorophenol may show slight motor weakness and convulsive seizures. Applied to the skin of rabbits the insecticide preparation caused a fatal liver necrosis, and when given orally to rats in lethal or near-lethal doses it produced coarse tremors and convulsions characteristic of either D.D.T. or pentachlorophenol poisoning. Liver damage in rats was not conspicuous. It was administered to three hens, because this species is especially susceptible to the neurological damage produced, for example, by tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate. Doses sufficient to make the hens very ill and cease eating were not followed by any evidence of neurological damage. This is perhaps not surprising, as the injury in these cases was mainly sensory, while in tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate poisoning they are mainly motor in distribution. It has thus prov.ed impossible to obtain confirmation of suspicions about this insecticidal preparation by means of animal experiment.