Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Pepper spray is all over the news, following the Occupy Wall Street protests, particularly following the widely disseminated images and videos of protestors being sprayed in NY, Portland, and UCDavis . Before that, I knew and occasionally used its main ingredient, capsaicin, as a treatment for my patients with shingles, an extremely painful Herpes zoster infection. And I knew about the many of the serious side effects of pepper spray, well-described by Deborah Blum .

One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper s burn. The scale as you can see on the widely used chart to the left puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habanero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units