There is a lot of nonsense that goes around about microwaves. I’m sure you heard many of them. They destroy nutrients in food. They cause cancer if you stand next to a microwave oven. Microwaved water kills plants. All poppycock. And then there is the story about a woman who died because the blood she received in a transfusion had been warmed up in a microwave oven? The case of Norma Levitt is an interesting one and is often used by anti-microwave activists to prove that microwaves are dangerous. This case proves nothing of the sort. Here are the facts.
Norma Levitt had successful hip surgery at the Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa in 1989, but unfortunately died on the operating table after the procedure. She received blood during the operation which had been warmed in a kitchen microwave oven. After her death, the family launched a lawsuit claiming negligence because the blood had been warmed in a non-standard fashion. The defendants, the doctors involved in the operation, asserted that the patient had died of a blood clot, a complication of surgery. The court found for the defendants, whereupon they launched a successful lawsuit against the plaintiff’s attorneys for wrongful accusation. Each defendant was awarded $12,500.
Whenever blood is used for a transfusion it is warmed to body temperature. Heaters especially designed for this process are available in order to guard against overheating which can result in hemolysis, or destruction of the red blood cells. This in turn causes release of potassium from the cells and excess potassium can be lethal. The issue is one of overheating the blood, not of the method used. Microwave ovens heat very quickly and temperature control is difficult. That’s why they are not appropriate for warming blood. Nothing to do with microwaves being “dangerous!”
The allegations on the anti-microwave websites suggest that somehow exposure to microwaves produced some dangerous substance in the blood which killed Norma Levitt. This is nonsense. Overheating blood by any method produces the same result. No, blood should not be heated in a kitchen microwave before a transfusion, but this has absolutely no bearing on cooking with microwaves. This is a classic case of taking a smidgen of truth and twisting it out of proportion. And incidentally, the court did not find that the transfused blood was the cause of death.
