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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here with a classic brain

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Speaker 1: Stuff episode for you. Some beauty sector experts are predicting

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Speaker 1: that the United States is heading toward post COVID boom

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Speaker 1: and elective treatments like botox. So today let's explore the

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Speaker 1: weird history of this treatment and what it has to

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Speaker 1: do with toxic sausage. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb here.

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Speaker 1: Do you have brown lines crow's feet? Now you can

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Speaker 1: make them disappear with the blink of a injection. Botox

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Speaker 1: has become a popular cosmetic treatment. And while it's pretty

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Speaker 1: common knowledge at this point that botox works thanks to

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Speaker 1: a carefully controlled toxin, what's less well known is that

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Speaker 1: we know about that toxin thanks to a batch of

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Speaker 1: killer sausages. In the early eighteen hundreds, it was this

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Speaker 1: perfectly poisonous tube pork medley that justin this Kerner, a

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Speaker 1: German physician, first suspected as the source of the potentially

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Speaker 1: deadly muscle relaxing bochulinum toxin. Sausage of questionable freshness was

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Speaker 1: not uncommon in turn of the nineteenth century Germany, but

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Speaker 1: after mysterious outbreaks of sausage poisoning during the Napoleonic Wars

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Speaker 1: repeatedly killed scores of people. Kerner got wise to the

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Speaker 1: cause after rigorous testing of hundreds of sausages and self

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Speaker 1: injections of the suspected toxin. He became the first to

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Speaker 1: identify and publish a clinical description of the toxin and

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Speaker 1: its effects. Food born botuli is um is caused when

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Speaker 1: the things we eat are infected with spores of Claustrodium

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Speaker 1: bachu linum microbes, a nearly bulletproof bacteria commonly found in

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Speaker 1: soil around the globe. When the microbe contaminates meat and

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Speaker 1: occasionally produced, it flourishes provided the environment is oxygen depleted.

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Speaker 1: This makes it the perfect deadly pairing with poorly preserved

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Speaker 1: foods and salted meats. Bachu linum toxin in the wild

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Speaker 1: can cause vision problems, difficulties swallowing, vomiting, and severely weakened muscles,

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Speaker 1: but people are so resourceful that they've figured out a

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Speaker 1: way to harness the toxin and focus its effects in

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Speaker 1: specific ways. Case in point the popularity of a wrinkle

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Speaker 1: raising serum known by the brand name botox. The use

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Speaker 1: of which has jumped by more than seven percent since

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Speaker 1: the year two thousand, according to the American Society of

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Speaker 1: Plastic Surgeons, and this increase only reflects cosmetic use. Botulinum

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Speaker 1: toxin is quite useful for a range of medical maladies,

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Speaker 1: including excessive sweating and migraines, and it can also relax

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Speaker 1: the perpetually contracted muscles of people who have cerebral palsy.

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Speaker 1: The art of looking good, just like botulinum toxin, has

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Speaker 1: a long and dubious history. Ancient Egyptians painted their eyelids

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Speaker 1: with a toxic cocktail of copper or in lead, and

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Speaker 1: the exposure lead to insomnia and brain damage. Greeks smeared

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Speaker 1: their faces with a lead based cream, which eventually caused madness.

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Speaker 1: Going to these great lengths may seem a bit ridiculous,

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Speaker 1: especially when one considers sacrificing health for beauty, but it's

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Speaker 1: not as far removed as you may think. We still

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Speaker 1: use mercury and some eye cosmetics as a preservative, all

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Speaker 1: though some states have banned the element, and in the

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Speaker 1: U two thousand, one third of thirty three red lipsticks

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Speaker 1: examined by a Safe Cosmetics advocacy group were found to

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Speaker 1: contain lead. As of sixteen, the US Food and Drug

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Speaker 1: Administration doesn't have a set limit for lead in cosmetics.

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Speaker 1: We do have a set of standards for commercial cure

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Speaker 1: to meat production, however, making most cases of botulinum toxin

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Speaker 1: poisoning a thing of the past. Though, just to be safe,

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Speaker 1: avoid any canned food that's bulging outward or that has

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Speaker 1: a dent along one of the cans seams, and don't

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Speaker 1: give honey to babies under one year of age. Yep,

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Speaker 1: that is a botulism safety precaution to Today's episode was

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Speaker 1: originally produced by Tristan McNeil and is based on the

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Speaker 1: article Ridiculous History Toxic German sausages are responsible for botox

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Speaker 1: on how stuff works dot com, written by Laurie L. Dave.

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Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership

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Speaker 1: with how stuff works dot Com and it's produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Klang. Or more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit

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