If Your Grandmother-Prescribed Medicine Feels Like Lead In Your Stomach, It’s Probs Because It’s Lead

Bogus-ass medicines prescribed by your immigrant relatives may actually be killing you, according to doctors. We knew those fuckers were out to get us:

Maria didn’t mean to poison her children. Quite the opposite.

Yeah, this is going to be good.

Worried about her daughters’ lack of appetite, the young Houston mother was merely following her grandmother’s advice when she gave the two girls and a niece a dose of “greta” — a Mexican folk medicine used to treat children’s stomach ailments.

What Maria, who asked that her last name not be used, did not know then, but now will never forget, is that the bright orange powder is nearly 90 percent lead.

Nah, she’ll forget by Friday. The hell?

Fortunately, doctors detected the dangerously high levels of the toxic metal in the little girls’ blood during a routine checkup a week later.

But others are not so lucky. Health departments around the country say traditional medicines used by many immigrants from Latin America, India and other parts of Asia are the second most common source of lead poisoning in the U.S. — surpassed only by lead paint — and may account for tens of thousands of such cases among children each year.

Dozens of adults and children have become gravely ill or died after taking lead-laden medicine over the past eight years, according to federal and local health officials.

The dangerous medicines are manufactured outside the United States and sold in the U.S. by folk healers known as curanderas and in ethnic grocery stores and neighborhood shops that offer herbs and charms.

They are usually brought into the country by travelers in their suitcases, thereby slipping past government regulators.

Not to mention how our grandmother is evidently hellbent on turning us obese and diabetic, what with her lard-fried-yucca-in-condensed-milk nonsense. Lesson: Your family will literally kill you. So you should probably move out of your mom’s basement sometime soon.

Immigrants’ traditional medicines linked to lead poisoning in children [NY Daily News]