What are the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning?

Answer 1

Carbon monoxide is a colorless and odorless gas, which makes it very dangerous. It can be found in gas fumes, such as from a car exhaust or gas powered heater. It causes headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea and vomiting. At higher levels, it can cause chest pain, confusion, loss of consciousness, and death from lack of oxygen. You will be unconscious within just a few breaths, and dead in less than 3 minutes!

The carbon monoxide molecules stick to your red blood cells and block the oxygen from getting to your cells, so you suffocate even though you are breathing air. Oddly, the blood cells turn a bright, healthy red color, so doctors can recognize carbon monoxide poisoning because the dead person looks pink and healthy!

A little more.

Symptoms of CO poisoning are the same as for hypoxia -- which in a way it is. These include:

• Confusion and lethargy
• Headache
• Dimness and/or narrowness of vision
• Syncope
• Depressed respiratory function
• Cardiac arrhythmia's
• Death
• Cherry red lips, gums, conjunctiva, finger nail beds.

What's happening is this: The respiratory pigment, hemoglobin, is the complex molecule that bonds to oxygen and carries it through your body to various organs that require O2. When hemoglobin is bonded to oxygen, it appears as a bright, vibrant red. When it's unbonded, it's a dark red -- almost a purple/blue.

Carbon Monoxide or CO bonds to hemoglobin about 20 times more efficiently than O2, hence the bright red cherry coloration of the blood. This blocks oxygen transport, and eventually causes death by hypoxia.

Breathing pure CO can kill very fast, but this rarely happens as pure CO isn't all that easy to find. It's a gas resulting from incomplete combustion. This would include car exhausts, using your BBQ indoors, and various other incomplete forms of combustion. As such, at lower concentrations, death may take a while.

Best treatment is hyperbaric O2 (I seem to recall 2 atmospheres being ideal but I'm not certain.). If you don't have the hyperbaric chamber, adminsiter oxygen and prepare for CPR with O2 if you can.