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Asked by 06aleemi to Hywel, Joseph, Poonam on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: which is the worlds most dangerous chemical, excluding radioactive elements?
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Joseph Cook answered on 24 Jun 2010:
Many chemicals are dangerous, but they are dangerous in different ways. I think the most reactive element is fluorine which is a gas. In terms of poisonous things, cyanides kill you very quickly if you eat them. Many chemicals are highly flammable and can cause explosions and fires if they aren’t dealt with in a safe manner, even common things like acetone and ethanol.
But don’t forget that even things like water, that seem safe, can kill you by drowning, so you need to be aware of the risks associated with any activity you are doing.
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Dr Hywel Jones answered on 24 Jun 2010:
Well I guess it depends what you mean by “chemical” and what you mean by deadly. For example, water can be deadly if you drown in it and many thousands of people drown each year in mass tragedies and individual events. However, you can have a bath in it and it would be safe.
Arsenic is a deadly poison but it is very rare, although it is found in low levels in water sources in Bangladesh for example.
If you count insect and snake venom as deadly chemicals then there are a lot of those out there that are very deadly to humans but again, this is thankfully quite rare.
And then there are things like tobacco, which many people around the world use regularly but causes many many deaths from cancers and lung disease.
I guess to really answer the question you need to define more precisely what it is that you need to know: is it the most deadly to you (an individual), is it short term toxicity or longer term effects, is it the number of people who are killed by it per year or the percentage of users of a chemical who are killed?I hope you can see that part of science is getting the question right as well as working out the answer.
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