50 Fun Facts About Poisons

Which poisonous plant did the Greek philosopher Socrates drink after an Athenian jury condemned him at his trial?

Hemlock owes its deadliness to an alkaloid called coniine, and as few as six to eight leaves can kill an adult.

Which sweet treat is dangerous to dogs because they break down its stimulant theobromine far more slowly than humans?

Chocolate gets riskier as it gets darker, because dark and baking varieties hold far more theobromine than refined sweets.

Which nutrient makes polar bear liver so toxic that the Inuit have long refused to eat it?

Vitamin A builds up in the livers of Arctic predators, and about 500 grams of polar bear liver is estimated to be an acute toxic dose for a person.

Which color was the arsenic pigment, named for chemist Carl Scheele, that sickened Victorians through their wallpaper?

Green wallpaper took the blame when damp rooms made people ill, because mold was thought to release arsenic vapours from the pigment.

Which garden plant has edible stalks but leaves made poisonous by high levels of oxalic acid?

Rhubarb leaves are inedible, and even the stalks should be skipped after a severe cold snap, when the acid can migrate out of the leaves.

Which toxic metal, once used to make felt hats, is the popular explanation for the expression mad as a hatter?

Mercury vapors poisoned so many felt hat makers that the illness picked up nicknames such as hatter's shakes and Danbury shakes.

Which fish, served in Japan as fugu, may only be prepared by chefs with three or more years of training?

Pufferfish organs carry tetrodotoxin, which paralyzes the muscles while the victim stays fully conscious, and there is no known antidote.

Which egg-laying Australian mammal defends itself with venomous spurs on the hind feet of the males?

Platypus venom is strong enough that the swelling and heightened pain in a stung limb can last for months.

Which crime novelist learned about poisons while working in a hospital dispensary during the First World War?

Agatha Christie qualified as an apothecary's assistant in 1917, then refreshed her knowledge in a London hospital pharmacy during the next war.

Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed in London by a suspected ricin pellet delivered with which everyday object?

An umbrella was the weapon, wielded by an unknown man on a London street, and the KGB was later reported to have helped the Bulgarian secret service.

Which bacterial product, considered the deadliest natural substance known, is injected to smooth facial wrinkles?

Botulinum toxin is sold in strongly diluted form under brand names such as Botox, and it works best on wrinkles in the upper third of the face.

Which painkiller brand was laced with cyanide in Chicago in 1982, a crime that led to federal anti-tampering laws?

Tylenol capsules bought anywhere in the Chicago area were pulled from homes and shelves in one of the largest pharmaceutical recalls ever.

Which fruit drink mix, often misremembered as a rival brand, was laced with cyanide at Jonestown in 1978?

Flavor Aid, in grape, is what most accounts put in the large metal tub, laced with sedatives too, yet Kool-Aid took the blame in popular memory.

In The Princess Bride, the man in black wins a battle of wits thanks to his immunity to which fictional poison?

Iocane powder never gave Vizzini a chance, because both goblets were poisoned.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the old king is murdered when poison is poured into which part of his body as he sleeps?

His ear is where the ghost says the juice of hebenon went, a poison nobody has firmly identified, though yew and henbane are the usual guesses.

Which legumes hold the highest levels of a lectin that causes food poisoning when they are eaten raw or undercooked?

Kidney beans are made safe by soaking and then boiling for at least thirty minutes, which cuts the toxin in a raw red bean from up to 70,000 units to a few hundred.

Which colorless, odorless gas poisons people by binding to hemoglobin so that the blood cannot carry oxygen?

Carbon monoxide gives little warning, because early symptoms such as headache and dizziness are often described as flu-like.

Mixing household bleach with which other common cleaning chemical produces dangerously toxic chloramine fumes?

Ammonia and bleach are often said to release chlorine, but the reaction really produces chloramines such as nitrogen trichloride.

In popular belief, which Egyptian queen died by letting a venomous snake known as an asp bite her?

Cleopatra may never have touched a snake, since Strabo, Plutarch and Cassius Dio wrote of a toxic ointment or a sharp implement such as a hairpin.

Which confidant of Russia's last tsar is said to have eaten cyanide-laced cakes in 1916 and appeared unaffected?

Grigori Rasputin's daughter doubted the tale, recording that her father avoided sweet food and would not have eaten the cakes.

Which poison from the seeds of the nux-vomica tree kills through violent muscular convulsions and asphyxia?

Strychnine only works if the hard-coated seeds are crushed or chewed first, so seeds swallowed whole may cause no symptoms at all.

Drops from which poisonous plant were reputedly used by Renaissance women to dilate their pupils?

Belladonna means beautiful woman in Italian, a name popularly linked to that cosmetic use, and the plant is also called deadly nightshade.

Which Swiss physician of the 1500s is credited with the maxim that the dose makes the poison?

Paracelsus wrote in 1538 that all things are poison and that only the dosage keeps a thing from being one.

Which king of Pontus and enemy of Rome so feared assassination that he regularly swallowed small doses of poison?

Mithridates VI reportedly grew so resistant that his own attempt at suicide by poison failed, and he asked a bodyguard to finish the job with a sword.

Which radioactive isotope, slipped into a teapot at a London hotel, killed former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko?

Polonium-210 was identified only after a veteran of Britain's early atomic bomb programme overheard talk of an odd gamma-ray spike and recognised its signature.

Which heavy metal is nicknamed the poisoner's poison because its salts are colorless, odorless and tasteless?

Thallium's telltale sign is hair loss, an effect that once saw it used as a hair remover before its toxicity was properly appreciated.

Which plant paste do South American hunters put on blowgun darts to paralyze prey, though it is harmless if swallowed?

Curare is only active once it enters a wound or the bloodstream, where it weakens the skeletal muscles until the diaphragm fails.

Which metal did the Romans use extensively in aqueducts, although the engineer Vitruvius preferred earthenware pipes?

Lead is plumbum in Latin, which is why its chemical symbol is Pb, and its toxicity was already noted by ancient Greek and Roman writers.

Which mushroom, easily mistaken for edible species, is blamed for about nine in ten mushroom deaths worldwide?

Death cap toxins resist both heat and cold, so neither cooking nor freezing makes the mushroom any safer.

Which tall garden flower supplies digitalis, the heart medicine first described in English by William Withering in 1785?

Foxglove is very toxic to people and other mammals, yet Withering's account of its heart effects is considered the beginning of modern therapeutics.

Which nerve agent did members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult release on Tokyo subway lines during rush hour in 1995?

Sarin was released in five coordinated attacks on three metro lines, and the cult had already used it in the city of Matsumoto nine months earlier.

Which car fluid is dangerous to children and pets because its main ingredient, ethylene glycol, tastes sweet?

Antifreeze sometimes has a bittering substance added to put off children and animals, though this has not been found to be effective.

Which alcohol, sometimes added to make industrial ethanol undrinkable, can cause blindness by damaging the optic nerve?

Methanol does its harm after the body breaks it down into formaldehyde and formic acid, which cause much of the toxicity.

Which sugar substitute used in chewing gum and toothpaste can cause life-threatening low blood sugar in dogs?

Xylitol triggers a surge of insulin in dogs, so the more they swallow, the further their blood sugar can crash.

Which glowing element poisoned factory women who pointed their brushes on their lips while painting watch dials?

Radium paint was said to be harmless, and the women were told to use their lips because rags or a water rinse wasted time and material.

Which British codebreaker died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, with a half-eaten apple found beside his bed?

Alan Turing's apple was never tested, so the idea that it had been laced with cyanide remains the speculation of some biographers.

Which stony mass that forms in the gut of animals was long prized as a universal antidote to any poison?

Bezoar stones were so trusted that a drinking glass holding one was thought to neutralize any poison poured into it.

Which substance do emergency doctors give by mouth to bind many swallowed poisons in the gut, ideally within an hour?

Activated charcoal is no cure-all, since it does not work for poisonings by cyanide, corrosive agents, iron, lithium or alcohols.

Which oily compound in poison ivy causes the itchy rash and also hardens into traditional East Asian lacquer?

Urushiol takes its name from urushi, the Japanese word for the lacquer tree, whose sap sets hard enough for lacquerware.

Which Soviet-era nerve agent poisoned former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England, in 2018?

Novichok was carried in a perfume bottle later found in a bin, which investigators said held enough to potentially kill thousands of people.

Which nerve agent did two women smear on the face of Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017?

VX may have reached him as two separate components, one on each woman's hands, experts suggested, and he died about 15 to 20 minutes later on the way to hospital.

Which chemical disfigured the face of Ukrainian candidate Viktor Yushchenko during the 2004 presidential campaign?

Dioxin left the lesions of chloracne on his face, but Yushchenko survived and was inaugurated as President of Ukraine in January 2005.

Which Indian city suffered a 1984 leak of methyl isocyanate gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant?

Bhopal's leak exposed more than 500,000 people to the gas and is considered the world's worst industrial disaster.

Which slow, largely undetectable poison was sold in 17th-century Italy to women who wanted to kill their husbands?

Aqua Tofana is linked to Giulia Tofana of Palermo, purportedly the head of a group of six poisoners working in Rome.

Which French king's court was shaken by the Affair of the Poisons, a scandal that ran from 1677 to 1682?

Louis XIV himself became alarmed that he might be poisoned, and the midwife known as La Voisin implicated several important courtiers.

Which New Guinea songbird is one of the few known poisonous birds, carrying batrachotoxins in its skin and feathers?

Hooded pitohui toxins are thought to come from the bird's diet, and they may ward off parasites as well as predators.

Monarch butterflies are toxic and foul-tasting to predators because their caterpillars feed on which plant?

Milkweed sap carries cardenolides that the caterpillars take into their bodies, although too much of the toxin harms the larvae themselves.

Which Caribbean beach tree bears fruit known in Spanish as the little apple of death and sap that blisters skin?

Manchineel is one of the most toxic trees in the world, with milky-white sap present in the bark, the leaves and the fruit.

Which national fruit of Jamaica causes a dangerous vomiting sickness if its flesh is eaten unripe?

Ackee is safe only when ripe, since the unripe flesh is rich in hypoglycin toxins, yet it stars in Jamaica's national dish with saltfish.

Which starchy tropical root, used to make tapioca, can contain enough cyanide to poison if it is improperly prepared?

Cassava is mostly eaten boiled, and careful preparation is what keeps the cyanide in the raw root off the plate.