[rescue] RE: [SunRescue] OT: AS/400 stuff

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 nick at snowman.net wrote:

> Actually IIRC it is one of the most lethal drugs per MG out there.

LD50 in caffeine is somewhere around 100mg/kg.  Strychnine is about
500ug/kg (that's micrograms), roughly 200 times more poisonous.  There are
many others that are worse than caffeine.  Crystalline botulinus toxin has
an LD50 of 7 x 10^-6 ug/kg, roughly 70 million times more toxic than
strychnine (and 14 _billion_ times more than caffeine).

That's right, assuming 80kg per person and 6 billion people, 3.36g of
botulinus properly distributed would hit the LD50 mark for the entire
human population.  For comparison, free Pu239 is about 1mg/kg, not even as
bad as strychnine.

-James