OT:Poisons ...

[Nightjar]

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Harry doesn't allow minor problems, like facts, to get in his way.

Colin Bignell

[Lobster]

On 28 Apr 2014, Jethro_uk grunted:

Waah... never mind the "OT" - you're not allowed to mention Breaking Bad (or Game of Thrones, or House of Cards) without preceding it with "Spoiler Alert"...

David (at Breaking Bad Series 3)

[Nightjar]

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An organophosphate, related to the agricultural insecticides suggested by Tim Lamb.

Colin Bignell

[stuart noble]

It is essentially a comedy after all

[Simon Cee]

iirc he took more than one tablet, so maybe not just an emetic.

iirc there a very effective nerve agent antidotes - tho time is critical.

But dont want to google it really.

[The Natural Philosopher]

hemlock sort of fits but dunno if there's an antidote.

generally vomit and pray..

Mushrooms are too slow to act...

Belladonna (atropine) is getting a bit closer. But I am not sure death within ten minutes is realistic.

probably snake bite venom might be something that night work if you had the anti-venin.

Its jolly hard to kill within minutes by eating. Most poisons take agonising hours.

[Adam Funk]

Is snake venom poisonous if it goes into the digestive system?

[Adam Funk]

"Terence, this is stupid stuff...."

[The Natural Philosopher]

I honestly don't know.

It's pretty good going to get ANYTHING from the mouth to the bloodstream in ten minutes anyway.

Insulin maybe..but that's not that lethal.

[Huge]

Sort of ...

[polygonum]

Although the general received wisdom is that they take tens of minutes to have any effect and, maybe, two hours to reach a maximum, oral thyroid hormones undoubtedly can have an effect within five minutes. T3 seems faster acting.

I write that as someone who has very many times observed the effects of thyroid hormones on someone who suffers severely. I can certainly notice taking them within ten minutes on occasion.

In terms of fast-acting and potentially fatal poisons, may I suggest tetrodotoxin (e.g. from Fugu fish)?

[Andrew Gabriel]

ISTR we all made small quatities of nitrotoluene (not TNT) in a chemistry practical at school (part of which I recall involved holding the test tube under a running cold tap to stop it getting too warm). At the end of the session, everyone poured it down the sink, and someone's expoded in the process of doing this. It could have been as a result of something left in the sink from a previous lesson.

[Andrew Gabriel]

If you read any of the write-ups of gas chamber executions in the US, there are frequent references to the whole block smelling of almonds afterwards, which was often how the death row prisoners learned that one of them had just been executed. So the concentration you can smell would seem to be some significant way below a lethal dose.

Some fruit pips do actually contain cyanide - often wondered if there's any link there to the smell of almonds.

[mcp]

Yes, you can smell it way before it gets to toxic levels. If you stop smelling it then it's really time to worry as at higher concentrations the nerve endings in your nose give up.

[Adam Funk]

Almonds are the seeds of a fruit in the genus Prunus, along with peaches, apricots, cherries, & plums. Most of the species have cyanogens in the seeds, which turn into hydrogen cyanide when they are damaged (by chewing, for example).

The "sweet almonds" (but they're often salted) that you can happily munch on have been selectively bred to get rid of the cyanogens, but a side effect of that is the loss of the almond smell, which you get in synthetic almond flavouring & in bitter almonds, which are readily available in some countries & used sparingly, like a spice, in baked goods. You do not want to eat a lot of those.

(I got this from McGee's _On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen_, a fascinating book if you like science & cooking.)

[Adam Funk]

That's interesting. So it's significantly less toxic going in that way (which is what I thought) & may have some beneficial effects (which is weird).

[Andrew Gabriel]

Thanks. I do have that book myself (somewhere - can't see it just now;-)

[Reentrant]

Tetrodotoxin maybe? Wikipedia says one death occurred 17 minutes after eating fugu / pufferfish. Maybe it's even quicker with a pure sample in alcohol.

[Nightjar]

I was under the impression that the main danger with ingesting a venom is if you have any bleeding in the stomach, which could provide a path into the blood stream.

Colin Bignell

[Adam Funk]

That makes sense. I didn't notice whether they tested the mice for ulcers first.