VARIOUS TYPES OF POISON AS A REFERENCE FOR YOUR NOVEL (3)

Continuing my article from Various Types Of Poison As A Reference For Your Novel (2) here are the following items:

        5. TETRODOTOXIN

Also known with name of Tetrodox and called TTX. Derive from Tentraodontiformes, from animal like puffer fish, blowfish, porcupine, sunfish, and triggerfish as well as other poison-carried species. Two sea creatures that dominate the production of this substance is a blue-ringed octopus and puffer fish (blowfish).

Pufferfish

The octopus is the most dangerous, when injecting its poison it could kill 26 adult men in a few minutes. Its bite itself is painless so the victims found out that they were bitten only after they get paralysis.

While the puffer fish is only harmful if you want to eat it, but if it’s well-cook in proper way then the poison will come out by itself, so the only thing left that can kill you is adrenaline.

Eastern people knew TTX before the western people did, especially in Southeast Asia and India. Even so the first case that involved western culture with TTX was when the crew of Captain James Cook on September 7, 1774 got sick after they eat strange fish. Their chef make meals from some tropical fish and gave it to the whole crew, while what remains were thrown to the pigs.   

After dinner the crew felt numbness and short breath while the pigs found dead the next morning. Fortunately the crew survived only because they were exposed to a light dose of Tetrodotoxin while pigs eat main parts of that puffer fish that contain most toxins. The most toxicities area is the liver and eggs of these fish.

The toxin was first isolated and named in 1909 by a Japanese scientist, Dr. Yoshizumi Tahara, who later studied and developed by the Japanese military as a biological weapon by doing experiments to human subjects in the 1930s.

TTX is highly toxic, as compared with other rat poison, a lethal dose (LD50) of potassium cyanide for rats is 8.5 mg / kg while TTX just need a dose of 334 mg / kg, so it’s clearly more dangerous than cyanide. 

It would be dangerous if injected because of the amount needed to kill the rats just 8 mcg / kg. Poisons also can enter the victim’s body by means of consumption, injection, inhalation, or peeling skin.

The workings of TTX is to inhibit nerve action potential firing by binding to the sodium channel voltage at the membrane of nerve cells and block the passage of sodium ions into nerve cells, resulting in the victim experiencing headaches, lethargy, tremors, paralysis, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. In a lethal dose there will be respiratory failure before it ends with coma.

6. STRYCHNINE

Is an alkaloid derived from plants of Strychnos nux-vomica which is the relatives of sorts intoxicating substances as caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, and theobromine. 

Alkaloids are rich in nitrogen, the basic material of the plants being pumped to themselves and not to be eaten. But men infatuated with these substances then and are grown as a crop for consumption so as to provide a compensation of evolution.

This plant gets its scientific name "Strychnos" from the ideas of a scientist named Carl Linnaeus, who were reclassified in the year of 1753. 

But long before it, the Indians were already familiar with Strychnos plant and migrated to Europe during an exploration of the world by the British which used to kill lot of rats that wandering in the ship. 

Meanwhile Strychnine substance was first discovered by the French chemist Joseph Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre-Joseph Pelletier in 1818 in Saint-Ignatius beans

In the late 19th century Strychnine popular as athletic performance enhancers and recreation stimulants because the effects boost the performance of body similar to coffee. 

In fact, the effect was explained very well in some character on H.G Wells novel titled Invisible Man. Even so there are some cases where Strychnine never killed accidentally, ie in 1892, when a writer named Henry Randolph purchased strychnine to poison cats.

Randolph put the compound in a drawer in his bedside table and one night woke up and decided to take a dose of quinine, a bitter alkaloid currently sold in powder form. Groping in the dark, he mixed with tonic and took it. He died three hours later. The similarities between quinine and strychnine did not go unnoticed.

Poisoning occur when the substances enter the body through injection, inhalation or swallow. When ingested strychnine tasted bitter, resembling something which similar to metallic. It shaped transparent crystal or white crystal powder, Strychnine has no special color or colorless and usually also do not have a distinctive odor.

The work of this toxin is by attacking central nervous system that causes excessive reflex reaction on its victims. The general symptoms appears for the first time as muscle spasms, during these seizures abnormal dilatation occurs, bulging eyes, eye movements continuously without deliberate, heart rate becomes rapid, spasm of the facial muscles, seizures dramatically on the back muscles that cause the body arched from the back and neck, the rest can also nausea and vomiting.

Get poison by Strychnine

If the proper dose is used at 15 mg / kg of body weight for children, and 30-60 mg / kg of body weight for adults, victims who contemned with this kind of poison will died in just ten to twenty minutes. The direct cause of death in strychnine poisoning can be a heart attack, respiratory failure, multiple organ failure as well as the failure of the brain.

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