Harvard researcher: coffee poisoning not accidental

One of six Harvard Medical School researchers who became ill after drinking coffee on Aug. 26 said on Monday the poisoning was not accidental, according to media reports.
Matteo Iannacone, postdoctoral fellow, 33, said he immediately noticed a “weird” taste after sipping an espresso he poured from a coffee machine in an eighth-floor lounge near his research lab.
After taking a second sip to make sure he wasn’t imagining the foul taste, he began feeling dizziness and a rapid heartbeat, but said the symptoms passed quickly.
“It was too strange for me to be an accident,” he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in an interview Monday.
Toxicology results, Iannacone said, showed the coffee contained a “very high concentration” of sodium azide, a powerful chemical preservative used in many research labs in the building and  can be fatal in high doses, causing respiratory failure.
Iannacone was one of six people who became ill after drinking coffee from the communal espresso machine.
Two of the researchers who drank coffee earlier in the day had fainted, but officials did not immediately connect their illnesses to the coffee machine, Iannacone said.
An ambulance carried Iannacone to nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital for treatment. Doctors could find nothing wrong, he said.

David Cameron, spokesman for Harvard Medical School, said the coffee machine is not connected to the water supply. The eighth floor coffee machine also served researchers and students on the 9th floor, he said, about 200 people total. The machine has since been removed.
“I have no idea who might have done this thing,” he said. “To me it doesn’t look like a joke, obviously, because we were not far from a lethal dose.”
Harvard police were looking into “every possible, conceivable option as to how this could have occurred,” said Cameron, a spokesman for Harvard Medical School.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it was looking into the incident to determine if there were any violations of health or safety standards in the workplace.