Toxicologist Answers More Poison Questions From Twitter

I'm Anne Chappelle.

I'm a board-certified toxicologist,

and I'm here today to answer your questions from Twitter.

This is Poison Support.

First up, we have a question from @koobylikon.

Dude, what makes poison poisonous?

Well, a poison is a substance that can do damage

to any living organism or to the environment,

but it's really all about the dose.

Low dose, less effects.

High dose, generally higher effects.

If you drank six liters of water,

that probably could kill you.

How about 118 cups of coffee in a row, or 75 espressos?

That would give you an overdose of caffeine.

Something else that could kill you right on your table:

225 grams of salt.

There's a lot of things

that you might not think are poisonous,

but in the right dose, they most definitely are.

@nextyounginn, WTF is sun poisoning?

I thought it was just called sunburn.

Both sun poisoning and sunburn are both caused

by overexposure to UV rays.

A severe sunburn becomes sun poisoning

when it moves from just that red, hot rash to blisters,

feeling like you have the flu, dizzy, or nauseous.

Sun poisoning is your body's immune reaction

to all of that sun damage.

So what do you do if you have either of those things?

Make sure you drink lots and lots of water.

That sun damage will dehydrate you,

and dehydration is a cause of a whole lot of other problems.

Stay out of the sun.

Apply cool, not icy cold, compresses on your skin.

Take an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory agent as well.

@WalkingDad_IE.

So if one happened to smash a mercury thermometer

and then happened

to spend an hour forensically gathering tiny dots

of quicksilver from the floor,

how would one happen to safely dispose of the evidence?

Asking for a friend...

It is very, very important that you are careful

and complete in how you actually clean up this spill.

Mercury can vaporize, get into the air,

and you can breathe it.

So you wanna see if you can have your windows open.

Please don't touch it.

I know it's fun to let it play in your hand,

but you can't do that anymore.

So wear some gloves.

Be very careful.

Use duct tape to kind of pound on the ground to clean it up.

You can use damp paper towels.

All of those things, those cleaning supplies,

everything, put into some kind of giant Ziploc-type bag,

and then you're gonna have to wait

until you have a hazardous waste collection day

and dispose of it properly.

Do not clean up spilled mercury with a vacuum cleaner.

Mercury is very, very dangerous for the environment,

and it's also not great for you either.

From @RickNowack, what is the most poisonous mushroom?

It's a poisonous mushroom.

Does it have to have the most poisonous?

Well, if you really want to know,

it's probably the death cap mushroom.

Within six to 12 hours, you are in incredible pain.

Nausea, vomiting, violent chills,

muscle contractions, all of these nasty things.

And eventually, if the dose was high enough,

you end up having liver failure,

multiple organ failure, and death.

From Crimson Sexta,

I've been trying for so long

to explain the difference between venom and poison

when it comes to snakes to my friends.

Help!

The difference really is how that poison is delivered

to the person.

A poison is administered or you're exposed to it

via breathing or touching it or ingesting it.

Venom, that is also a poison,

but it's how you get that poison.

That's more of a sting or a bite.

So it's more active.

You eat a frog, that's a poison.

You get bit by a copperhead snake,

that's a venomous attack.

@WildlifeDefence asks, what is Compound 1080?

Compound 1080 is an extremely potent predacide.

Predacide is designed to kill predators.

So if you've got sheep and goats in your field

and you've got a problem with coyotes,

well, this is what you would use.

Because Compound 1080 is so potent,

they have a special way to administer it

to avoid killing broad numbers of animals in your field.

There's a collar that they put around the neck.

So it's got a collar with a reservoir of the 1080 right

along the neck so that when the coyote comes along

and grabs the neck,

it bites into that reservoir and is immediately poisoned

and dies.

@LTHSAPES asks, what does a toxicologist study?

Just like there's different kinds of doctors,

there's lots of different kinds of toxicologists.

I am an occupational toxicologist,

and my job is to look at all the things

that could be in a workplace.

Food toxicologists, for example,

they work to make sure our food supply is safe.

I even know a toxicologist that works at a winery.

From @bluebellbats,

Google search how to detect poison.

Unfortunately, to detect a poison,

I'm gonna need to have a little bit more information.

If the lead singer is Brett Michaels,

then I'm sure it is poison.

If it's just bad medicine, sorry, that's Bon Jovi.

If it's party poison, that's My Chemical Romance.

@katlinnrebecca asks, so is alcohol actually poison, or...

Anything can be a poison in the right dose,

and alcohol is definitely a poison if you drink too much.

First of all, alcohol can impair your central nervous system

so that can slow your breathing.

A byproduct of alcohol metabolism is the formation

of acetaldehyde.

Acetaldehyde is a chemical that really likes

to damage parts of your liver.

Long-term, that slow exposure over time to alcohol

and its metabolites can result in cirrhosis

and other kinds of liver damage,

eventually leading to potentially liver cancer.

From @lkhouvanjou75,

mad hatters were mad because of the lead/mercury?

Anybody know why?

I do.

It was mercury.

Mercury was used to help make the different skins they used

for hats.

It helped that fur matte really well.

It also toughened up the fibers

and was made of very high-quality felt

that was gonna be used in the hat.

Part of the hat-making process is

that you steam the hat.

That releases all of that mercury into the air,

and then they breathed it.

They said that they were mad hatters.

It's because of many of the psychological symptoms

that the overexposure to the mercury caused:

hallucinations, dizziness, tremors.

You think of mad hatters, actually,

as something being from Victorian times,

ut actually it wasn't until 1940s that,

in the United States,

the governor of Connecticut banned the use

of mercury in hats.

@Apypawe asks, how long does poison take to work?

Some poisons can make you sick right

after you ingest, breathe, or touch it.

Other poisons, those can take a lifetime to really manifest

in its adverse effects.

Something like cyanide.

You've seen them eat those poison pills in movies.

That definitely can kill you within a few minutes.

Cyanide is a very toxic chemical,

and it is extremely potent.

When you get exposed to cyanide,

it quickly enters your cell and stops your cell's ability

to actually make energy.

You see the convulsions, you have a heart attack,

you have different problems within your heart,

and it's all because cyanide is really good

about getting in your body and inside those cells

where it irreversibly stops all energy production.

Let's take another example like E.coli-contaminated lettuce.

You eat your sandwich, you're happy,

and then that bacteria produces a toxin

that slowly gets released and absorbed into your gut

and into the rest of your body.

So it takes a few days, often,

for E.coli to really start to exert its adverse effect.

That's one of the reasons why food poisoning is

so difficult to diagnose.

You have to go back to food that you ate maybe three

or four days ago.

And I can't even remember what I had for breakfast.

@96Berry asks, if a poison expires,

will it still be poisonous, or will it not?

Actually, it really depends.

Some drugs, some pesticides,

some chemicals that are poisons,

they break down very readily

when they're exposed to air, moisture.

Some poisons are what I would consider shelf-stable.

It doesn't matter how long that they sit around,

they're still going to be just as potent

as the day they came out of the factory.

@A2PathwaysMedia asks,

what are the long term effects of lead poisoning?

Serious.

The problem with lead is that it is stored in your bones.

As you age and you naturally lose bone density,

lead is slowly released.

A young child who happens to ingest lead paint,

they're gonna be seen with lower IQ,

potentially hearing problems.

In adults, a lot of times,

the adverse effects most associated

with lead exposure is high blood pressure.

And what happens when you have constant high blood pressure?

You're at higher risk for stroke and heart attack.

@thelarssan asks, what is the deadliest poison?

Clostridium botulinum bacteria.

These are usually happy, little microbes that live in soil.

When they are deprived of oxygen,

they produce the world's most deadliest toxin, botulinum.

You can find botulism toxin in expired food containers.

Don't eat those.

Botulism toxin causes an inhibition of the release

of acetylcholine, as diagrammed here.

So if you cannot release acetylcholine,

then you can't have your muscles contract.

Then, you really can't breathe,

and your heart won't work correctly.

But there's actually an upside to botulism toxin.

It's called Botox.

There are lots of people

that really don't want certain muscles

in their face to contract anymore.

They go to the doctor and they get an injection of Botox.

You can also use botulism toxin

to treat several other kinds of conditions,

like migraines, certain rapid blinking diseases.

You can also get Botox injections

to stop excessive sweating.

@chaeyoungsslave asks the question,

how does overdosing on pills actually work?

Genuinely curious.

An overdose doesn't necessarily mean death.

An overdose means that you've absolutely taken too much

of that particular medicine,

and that could result in adverse effects

that are detrimental to life and health.

Another way that you can overdose results

from a combination, maybe,

of different drugs that you normally would take separately,

that when combined, they all have the same intended effect,

and then that overwhelms your body.

And that can be what kills you.

Here's another example.

You build up tolerance for a certain drug for a while,

and then you stop taking it.

Your body goes back to the pre-levels

of how it was able to metabolize it.

And then, all of a sudden, you take another high dose,

thinking, Hey, that's the dose I used to take,

and that throws you into an overdose.

Okay, @AdelePrass, how fast does Hemlock work?

I'm thinking I should stockpile Brompton's Cocktails.

In the 1930s,

a Brompton Cocktail was commonly given

to terminally ill people,

and it was this crazy mixture of morphine, cocaine, alcohol,

anti-nausea agents, as well as tranquilizers.

The goal of a Brompton Cocktail was to relieve pain

and to help you be awake enough so that you could talk

to your friends when they came to visit you

on your deathbed.

You also asked about Hemlock.

Hemlock is a plant that, the leaves,

and especially the roots, are very, very poisonous.

So you really wouldn't take a Brompton Cocktail

and add some Hemlock to it,

because the Brompton Cocktail was really made,

not to help you die,

but to help you be happy

and pain-free when your friends came to visit.

@nicksbluepen: y'all, how poisonous is pen ink?

It isn't very toxic.

According to the World Health Organization,

ballpoint pens, felt-tip pens, fountain pens,

all of them do not contain enough toxic ingredients,

even if you sucked on them,

to cause serious adverse effects.

However, you might have a blue tongue.

Question from @SportsPundette,

anybody ever had rebound poison ivy rash?

No?

Just me?

Perfect.

This is not uncommon.

If you have a bad poison ivy rash,

sometimes the doctor will give you an injection of steroids

to help calm your immune system down

so that the rash can go away.

If that medicine wears off before you're fully healed,

then you can get what they call a rebound rash.

That's all the questions I could find on Twitter.

So until next time,

this is Anne Chappelle with Poison Support.