Reference no: EM133255933

Case: One day during winter break, Mary was talking with her grandmother. While reminiscing about her college years in the 1930s, the grandmother recalled a sad memory. When she was a junior in college, she had a good friend named Barbara who became very sick and died during the spring semester. Like many young women, Barbara had been preoccupied with her weight. She was planning to work as a model the following summer and wanted to lose weight before then. A new miracle diet pill had just come on the market, and Barbara began taking it. Figuring that more was better, she took more than the recommended dose of pills. Before long, Barbara began experiencing blurry vision and a constant high fever that she couldn't shake. Barbara eventually died, and her death was ultimately blamed on the diet pills. The pills were later taken off the market because they caused cataracts and sometimes death in many people who were taking them. Mary asked her grandmother why the pills made people die, but her grandmother didn't know. All she remembered was that they were called Dinistriso and had something called DNP in them.

Help Mary figure out why these diet pills were killing people.

Question 1) What is DNP, and why was it in a diet pill? How does DNP make you lose weight? Briefly explain the mechanism of drug action at the cellular level.

Question 2) Why did Barbara experience fever?