Boiled alive by the tablets She took to lose weight?

Victim: Sarah Houston, 23, had complained of feeling hot and unwell and had been breathing heavily on the evening of her death

Beside her bed in her student digs, Sarah Houston had placed a handwritten note. ‘If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way,’ it read. 

Looking back, her parents Geoff and Gina say it perfectly summed up their 23-year-old daughter, a young woman studying to be a doctor whose travels around the world had given her an appreciation of the plight of others less fortunate.

But while that may have been a side of Sarah they knew, there was a dark secret that she was hiding from them. And, ultimately, it was a secret that would cost Sarah her life.

In that same room, was a brown envelope containing dozens of capsules of the industrial chemical Dinitrophenol, or DNP. Used primarily nowadays as a pesticide, in recent years it has been increasingly abused by those attempting to find a way of losing weight — fast. Taken orally, it speeds up the metabolism, making the body burn up fat. 

For her part, Sarah had suffered from eating disorders from the age of 14, first anorexia and then bulimia. And while her parents had thought she was over the worst of it, she had, in fact, been taking DNP for the previous 18 months. Then, last September, the medical student took what turned out to be a fatal dose while away studying at Leeds University.  

At first no one knew what had caused her death. But then toxicology tests on the substance found in that brown envelope came up with an answer. At an inquest earlier this week, coroner David Hinchliff concluded that DNP was ‘entirely’ responsible for Sarah’s death.

Her parents are now campaigning to highlight the risks of taking DNP and, as the Mail reveals today, are joined in that call by others who have lost children to this drug. 

Four young men and women are now thought to have died in Britain after taking the drug in the past six years, three of them in the past six months alone.