Description
ENVIRONMENTAL AND OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH FOR PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTITIONERS
Choose Your Poison
In this activity, you’ll have a chance to practice using the LD50 to estimate your own lethal dose of a favorite treat. I first tried this exercise with freshmen students at Emory University, because I thought it was important for them to understand, deeply, that you can actually die from ethanol poisoning.
Now, you are a responsible adult, so this isn’t a potentially life-saving exercise for you. But still, it should help plunge you into the field of toxicology and risk assessment.
Choose your own poison from the three highlighted here… ethanol, sodium chloride, or caffeine. You can choose another from this list if you like, although please tell me you don’t have any mercuric chloride lying around! Or perhaps you are curious about something that is not on this list? Acetaminophen would be a good choice, and one whose toxicity we should all be familiar with.
Now, let’s figure out how many of these delicious indulgences it would take to kill you, in one sitting. Choose your poison and answer the questions in the next section to figure out how many it would take to kill you (meaning you if you were one of the unlucky 50% of test subjects).
Body weight is 110 pounds
questions to answer :
Which indulgence did you choose?
What information do you need to know to figure out how many would kill you? (hint: it’s perfectly OK to lie about your body weight in this exercise– I would!)
Where would you go to find this information?
How many would it take to kill you?
Is there any scenario you can envision where you might get close to this lethal dose? (hint: please say no!)
