Author(s): Karen Starko

Science

"Trusted is the tale of finding the cause of Reye’s syndrome, a
devastating and mysterious illness described by Dr RDK Reye and
colleagues at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children,
Camperdown, Sydney in 1963.
In 1978, ten-year-old Mark Keller woke up with fever, headache
and a cough. His mother kept him home from school that day and a
few more. He appeared to be getting better. Then, with no warning,
Mark began vomiting violently and became delirious. His parents
rushed him to his pediatrician’s office. An ambulance was called and dispatched immediately. During the 15-minute ride to the emergency
department, Mark lapsed into a coma. Within hours he was dead. Parents
were terrified of the enigmatic illness. Doctors were saying ‘nothing can be
done beyond taking aspirin.’
Before Covid-19, before Flint, before AIDS, this deadly brain-swelling
illness was striking down thousands of perfectly healthy children and was
one of the first man-made public health crises in modern times. Trusted is a
non-fiction, memoir-exposé of the discovery of aspirin as the cause and
history of this decades-long, twentieth-century tragedy."