It doesn’t take into account so many things, and it’s extremely misleading.
Most of these chemicals don’t ever appear in products in their pure form, so there’s so much here that simply isn’t relevant.
There’s also consideration here that everything is by weight, and it makes sense to create that as a standard, but many of the pure forms of these items are far more dense than you would expect. One that stands out is uranium. A gram of it would be incredibly small, approximately 0.05 cm cubed. 1 lb is around 1.45" cubed (for my American friends).
So it would be an insanely small amount. Meanwhile water is insanely light by comparison. While also safer per gram, so it’s an insanely large amount of water before any damage can be done while a relatively small rock of uranium can tear your DNA apart.
The whole chart is wildly misleading. It might be accurate, though, I have no idea if it is, but the fact is that it makes it seem like normal every day compounds like vitamin B will kill you at lower doses than uranium. While technically true based on weight, it makes uranium seem relatively safe by comparison and bluntly it’s not. Even the smallest amount of pure uranium, which this chart would regard as “safe”, would cause you to become incredibly sick for a very long time.
I hope nobody gathers “new” information from this chart and decides to do something stupid; but honestly, there’s a lot of idiots in the world, and if anyone is that dumb, I wonder if the average intelligence of the planet might increase a bit.
I work with WiFi professionally, so I have a pretty good understanding of radio waves from that. On top of that, I’m a radio hobbyist, so I gathered a pretty good understanding of electromagnetic waves and how they operate… Mainly in the context of getting them from A to B successfully, but the physics behind it does not change regardless of frequency.
While all radio waves can dissipate as heat when absorbed by an object, the wavelength of that signal affects how small of an object it will interact with. Lead is a good example, since it’s a dense lattice of atoms and can interact with most electrical and magnetic fields. Radio waves have a hard time penetrating even a small layer of lead because they’re usually too large of a wave to fit between the atoms. At a certain, very high, frequency, lead gets less effective, and only by making that lead layer thicker and thicker, basically putting the randomness of atom arrangement in the path of the wave, can the signal be stopped.
When a high frequency wave interacts with flesh, like a person, it will usually penetrate a distance then be absorbed into the material, this is the basic principle that allows x-ray imaging to work. The more dense the material (bones vs muscle and organs and such), the more is absorbed, and you get a dark spot on the resulting image. I won’t get into the development of the images, because they’re usually inverted, that’s a function of photography and how pictures work.
Taken to the extreme, higher and higher frequency signals, like uranium produces, goes even further, interacting with the atoms that make up your DNA, and destroying them. It’s a gruesome process and it takes a long time before the symptoms of radiation appear, and a very long recovery (or death) in most cases. With uranium, you’d die from radiation long before the toxicity of the uranium can kill you, even if you’re “only” taking <something less than a lethal quantity>.
Knowing as much as I do, radiation at this level is scary. It’s silent, with no visible indication that it’s happening, and it will kill you dead without any indication it ever existed. It always humors me when people take up arms against some new wireless technology where the principle frequency is under 100Ghz, and people are so afraid of it giving them cancer. The lightbulbs in your house are more apt to give you cancer than 5G or whatever. Light is an electromagnetic wave, the same as the radios in the 5G towers, but light is in the terahertz range, over 500x higher frequency than your wifi. Above that, in terms of frequency is UV-A, UV-B, etc, up to x-rays, and on. Above x-ray, is all the radioactive emissions from uranium, plutonium, etc. Literally thousands of times higher frequency than the evil 5G. EM only becomes ionizing (aka, dangerous) around UV-B, which is why you should always wear sunscreen.
We (humans) only use higher frequency EM in the context of medical use (cancer treatments, x-rays, etc) in highly controlled environments, and for use in power plants and bombs. I’m sure some industrial uses exist too, but I’ll just skip over that since it usually has the same controls as medical uses. The only other place I know of that we use radioactive material at all is in smoke detectors. We limit it, we regulate it, we keep the stupid public away from it, because they don’t know the danger of such substances.
I look at that and I’m not sure that’s right either. Maybe if you took concentrated nicotine extract (pure) and drank it, then yeah, it could become lethal.
I don’t think anyone can smoke enough cigarettes or vape enough to reach a dangerous toxicity level. I’m pretty sure you’d pass out long before reaching a fatal dose. So the only way you could get to that point is to either inject, ingest or otherwise absorb a lot of nicotine all at once. The usual delivery methods (via the lungs) would probably not work for this. I suppose if you rigged up a continual tobacco burner and hot boxed an area with smoke containing nicotine (either vapor or smoke from burning it), maybe? Or if you slapped on a few dozen nicotine patches after smoking a few packs and went to bed?
The only other way I can think of to get that much nicotine in you is to buy high concentration vape liquid and drink it; but I’m pretty sure your body would simply vomit it back out and you’d survive. I’m sure it wouldn’t be pleasant, but it wouldn’t be fatal.
Cocaine on the other hand… I don’t know enough about, but I’m sure people have OD’d on it, so I’m sure there are ways.
It really takes that much gasoline to be lethal? You mean to tell me less THC is needed to kill you than drinking gasoline? It’s almost 10 times as much!
I’m pretty sure the figure for heroin is on the high side too. Most people won’t have a tolerance, and a lethal dose would be quite a bit lower than this.
I assume this is talking about pure gasoline. The stuff that you get out of the pump is anything but pure. It contains benzene, hexanes, and other really nasty chemicals that will kill you quickly and slowly (e.g. cancer)
This looks like a quite useless guide. All these substances appear in vastly different doses in the environment, so it in no way shows what is more likely to kill you or accurately shows what you are supposed to be careful with.
Looking at the wikipedia page for some of those, it seems to be intravenously. For example, Botox (the last one): “A toxin is 1.3–2.1 ng/kg intravenously or intramuscularly, 10–13 ng/kg when inhaled, or 1000 ng/kg when taken by mouth”
Back in college, there was this thing called the “4, 4, 40 challenge” where one would have to drink 4 liters of water, in 4 minutes and hold it down for 40 secs. Lots of vomiting would ensue.
More than 1200 mg of pure THC, or 1200mg of cannabis leaves?
Those aren’t even remotely the same thing, in the same way that 12oz of beer and 12oz of everclear are very different, or 1g of pure nicotine is very different than 1g of tobacco leaves.
Not to mention, LD50 is about a single dose. There’s a big difference between taking one shot an hour for 16 hours straight, and chugging 16 shots in one go.
I think the per kg is important there. 192mg/kg of body weight is the lethal dose. So for example a 100kg person would need 19,200mg of caffeine to be a lethal dose. To edit: that’s not to say that the lethal dose in this picture is wholly accurate. Caffeine has been known to cause cardiac arrest even in lower doses.
What’s the denominator here? Like water is toxic at 90g/1kg, what’s the other 910g? Because I definitely drink over a litre of water a day and I’m doing fine.
I believe it’s body weight, so if you weighed 200lb (~90kg) you’d have to drink 8100g of water to possibly die and you have to drink it fast and not pee it out. There was a woman several years back that did die from this, a radio station did a contest “hold your wee for a wii”
It’s complicated. Short version, over a small amount of time.
In the case of water, how it kills you is by diluting your blood, basically. Your kidneys will be working extremely hard (and quickly) to empty out the excess water, so for the most part, you’ve got to drink much faster than your kidneys can work.
That said, it’s not just speed - other stuff gets cleaned out with your urine, like certain vitamins and such. Drinking excess water over a long time, but significantly more than what’s on the chart, will drain you of certain nutrients / electrolytes, and that’ll screw you, too.
Drinking sports drinks in that quantity could actually sidestep that particular problem, drastically raising the amount of water you can take in.
One way or another, though, while it’s possible to hurt or kill yourself from drinking too much water, you have to bring it to some serious extremes and your body should be vehemently complaining during this process.
If ever you think you’re doing something extreme and might possibly be slightly risky in this regard, just drink some electrolyte heavy stuff instead for a while - Gatorade, Powerade, etc. Then your only risk is basically outrunning your kidneys and your stomach should really be making you throw up if you try that.
You kinda mentioned that some substances bioaccumulate, but some also “biomultiply” like bacteria, viruses and prions. This plays a role in how a lethal dose can be administered to be effective.
If you weigh 100kg, drinking 90*100g=9kg of water produces a 50% chance of fatality. The definition of LD50 requires the dose to be given “all at once”, and quite frankly, you would not be able to drink 9 liters of water all at once. LD50 becomes a lot less meaningful for anything where you would need an extreme concentration of the substance–e.g. THC is difficult to acquire in concentrations compatible with fatal overdose–or where consuming it at such quantities is simply infeasible.
People often say “consumed rapidly” but that phrasing doesn’t really solve this problem with LD50 as a measure. Basically LD50 is meaningful near the bottom of this chart, less so near the top of this chart.
I’ll note that another problem with LD50 is that it doesn’t take into account serious harms that can occur with lower dosages. Drinking any amount of gasoline is likely to lead to serious brain damage, for example.
Everyone knows the LD50 is a binary condition! Either you live or you die! That’s why I always dose just under the LD50 to make sure I never suffer any consequences.
Yeah, they should tell you how to administer each to maximize toxicity in humans. And the ingredients. And what equipmemt you need. And the preparation steps. And how to conceal the dose. And how to pin it on someone.
Come to think of it, that also solves the “not a guide” problem.
Most of it is for rats because experiments on humans would be illegal. The acute oral LD₅₀ for gasoline in rats has been reported to be 14063 mg/kg in this paper: Beck LS, Hepler DI, Hansen KL. 1983.
It really should have been theobromine, from chocolate. It’s 1000mg/kg via oral ingestion.
This is what kills dogs, as they’re more susceptible at 200mg/kg. They’ve gotta really pack in the chocolate first to reach that, though. And it had better be dark chocolate for its higher levels of theobromine. Pure cocoa has about 2.1% theobromine by weight.
Technically speaking, if the water is pure enough it can demineralize you and kill you over the course of about a week. UPW or HPW are often used to describe these substances, created in specialized labs or equipment for industry use.
Is that actually true? I’ve looked this up a while and it said it’s basically overblown or urban myth (wiki). Basically we’ve been drinking rainwater forever (I know it’s not pure) and you get so much stuff through food that it might lead to deficiency but not quickly.
Wikipedia isn’t a source you concaveman. Even just clicking the citation numbers and finding the actual source at the bottom would be fine, instead you chose the stupid route. I’ll admit the risk was overblown by sensationalism journalists, but it’s not a myth in the slightest.
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