How much carbon monoxide must be breathed to be fatal?

Answer 1

if losing 40% of blood loss is fatal then id assume that denaturing 40% of haemoglobin in the blood would be fatal,you only need one molecule of CO to render a whole haemaglobin molecule useless which usually carry's four O2 molecules,so if you have 30,000,000,000,000 RBC's(red blood cell), you have 270,000,000 haemaglobins in each RBC,you are gonna need about 2*10^21 molecules of CO to denature 40% of your haemaglobin which is probably fatal,or 0.0033moles/ 0.093 grams of CO,your average petrol car generates around 2g/km of CO so if you hooked the exhaust to a chamber and drove a kilometre you could kill 200 people with the CO alone,your average diesel car generates around 0.6g/km of CO

Answer:

Like most toxic poisonous substances Carbon Monoxide can be fatal at may combinations of time and exposure levels. There are safe working conditions hich allow some Carbon Monocide in the workplace air. The exposure time and levels of concern by NIOSH standards are:

Exposure (hours)/CO Concentration (ppm)

0.5 hours /2000 ppm

1 hours /1600 ppm

2 hours/1000 ppm

4 hours / 400 ppm

6 hours / 200 ppm

8 hours / 150 ppm

Answer 2

Carbon monoxide is harmful because the hemoglobin in our red blood cells prefers it to oxygen. If it is present, it attaches to the hemoglobin and remains attached, rather than being exchanged for oxygen in the lungs. If there is enough carbon monoxide it takes up all the space, and the blood cannot carry enough oxygen to sustain life.

Carbon monoxide is toxic as long as it is in the body. It takes several hours for it to clear on its own, but that can be accelerated by administration of pure oxygen and some more advanced techniques.

Answer 3

It depends on the amount of carbon dioxide in the area. carbon monixide is an invisible and odorless killer so the especific time that a person has died of carbon monixed is not well documented. Bradley Delp the male soprano singer of the band Boston, comitted suicide by lighting two Charcoal grills in a sealed room. Time it took him to die could not be stimated. Families that have died by carbon monixide during the night in their sleep from charcoal heaters also the time it took could not be stimated. There has been incidents were people have been able to be save found unconsious before dying from carbon monoxide poisoning again unable to rule a specific time to die from carbon monoxide poisoning.