![]() ![]() "It looked like people were getting burns all over their body," says Dr. Later, in 2009, a few cocaine addicts in San Francisco crack smokers, mostly began displaying even stranger symptoms, like dead, darkened skin. However, in April of that same year, a New Mexico lab had identified a small number of unexplained cases of the disorder, also in people who had snorted, injected or smoked cocaine. ![]() The medical literature didn't contain any studies linking agranulocytosis with cocaine. (See how cocaine scrambles genes in the brain.) "We were theorizing that maybe it was something in the cocaine," she says. Nancy Zhu, who treated the patients during her hematology fellowship at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. Neither of the Canadian patients fit that bill, but they did have one thing in common: illegal drug use, says Dr. Their symptoms were consistent with a life-threatening immune-system disorder called agranulocytosis, which kills 7% to 10% of patients and is rare except in chemotherapy patients and those taking certain antipsychotic medications. In the summer of 2008, a man and woman, both in their 20s and both cocaine users, were separately admitted to a Canadian hospital with unremitting fevers, flulike symptoms and dangerously low white-blood-cell counts.
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