A Queensland university student who inadvertently ingested rat poison in Taiwan faces a long battle to recover after finally being repatriated to an Australian hospital.
Alex Shorey arrived back in Australia on Wednesday night, after weeks in the intensive care unit Taipei Medical University hospital.
The 24-year-old inadvertently consumed the poison superwarfarin at the end of March and had anaphylactic reactions to the vitamin K and plasma treatments he had been on to treat it.
His family wanted him brought back to Australia so he could be treated by specialist toxicologists, but he did not have travel insurance, so his family raised more than $200,000 for a medical evacuation flight.
Mr Shorey was taken to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane on Wednesday night, where he remains in a stable condition.
His parents, Stephen and Julie, flew back to Australia from Taiwan on a commercial flight yesterday and are now by his bedside.
"He is still weak and bed bound but slept well with melatonin last night," Dr Stephen Shorey said.
"He is not chatty, just tapping away on his phone.
"His pulse has improved ... the best it has been in weeks."
Yesterday, posting to his medical practice's Facebook page, Dr Shorey said he was relieved Alex was in Brisbane.
"He is in good hands," Dr Shorey said.
"It's been a very difficult last three to four weeks. But we are just so relieved and grateful to the medical team in Taiwan who helped stabilise Alex.
"Also, to the retrieval team and the generous supporters who helped bring him home."
Taipei media has reported local police are investigating the case.
Long recovery
Ian Musgrave, senior lecturer in Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide, said Mr Shorey would face a long recovery after being poisoned by superwarfarin.
"Because these things last a long time, you have very long-lasting bleeding problems, which has been shown in the problems this young man is having," Dr Musgrave said.
"It will take a while to repair the blood vessels, it'll take a while to get back from having very low blood volume.
"The majority of the effects are due to the significant amount of bleeding and of course, he's had bleeding into his muscles, so that will take a while to clear and repair."
He said superwarfarin was a broad class of compounds related to the rat poison warfarin.
"The main difference between Warfarin and superwarfarin is that they are much longer lasting compounds, and far more potent."
Nasty poison
He said the poison was "nasty" and was very effective in preventing the action of Vitamin K — an essential part of the body's clotting system.
Dr Musgrave said it was rare to see superwarafin poisoning cases in humans, because the compound was packaged in ways to deter to people from eating it.
But he said it was possible to be accidentally poisoned by eating animals that may have consumed superwarafin.
"Because we have very strong food safety systems, anything like this is picked up rapidly."
"But it is entirely possible something like that could have happened, that there was an accidental dosage in the food supply."
He said it was also possible herbal medicine may have been a source of the poisoning.
"We've seen contamination in one herbal medicine, we picked up contamination with warfarin — why exactly warfarin was in an herbal medicine is not clear."
"It's possible that it could get into other items that could be ingested accidentally."
