Whats the fastest-acting, most lethal poison?
What’s the most insidious, least detectable? — JP, Syracuse, New York Toxicologists have a blunt way of rating a poison’s lethality. Discussed here before, it’s called the LD-50, or 50 percent lethal dose – the amount that on average kills half the target critters. As the term may suggest, a fair amount of guesswork is involved. Since most governments object to running toxicity tests on humans, researchers substitute lab animals, who don’t necessarily react like us. Individual susceptibility varies widely depending on metabolism, tolerance, etc; differing effectiveness among poison delivery methods is another wild card. A compound with a relatively high LD-50 might be carcinogenic and therefore deadlier in the long run, nicotine offering the salient example. So it’s hard to say definitively which poison is the fastest, most insidious, or tastiest. I’ll tell you about some of the deadlier toxins known, and you can make your own plans. Poison is nature’s great equalizer. Snakes, spiders,
