There's no treatment for chronic arsenic poisoning. For centuries, arsenic was the go-to poison for murder. If you wanted to knock off an heir to the throne or speed up the arrival of your inheritance, all you had to do was add a dollop of rat poison to your rival's food. They wouldn't see or taste it. And the police wouldn't detect it — at least not until a chemist developed a test for the element in the early 19th century.
At high doses, arsenic causes vomiting, convulsions and eventually coma. At low,chronic exposure, the metal causes skin lesions, liver damage and several types of cancers.There's no treatment for chronic arsenic poisoning. But what if people could flush the poison out of their bodies before it has a chance to do damage? Turns out, all it might take is the right gene. High in the Andes Mountains there's a population that has adapted genetically to the poison,…
