ELI5- What is the difference between Toxin, Poison, and Venom?
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Poison is dangerous to ingest, venom is dangerous if it get into your blood, toxin is a naturally occurring poison.
Something bites you, and you die, that’s *venom*.
If you bite something, and you die, that’s *poison*.
Toxin is the broad term for a chemical produced by living creatures that is harmful.
Being broader, poisons harm you by being absorbed through the stomach or mucus membranes. Venom needs to be placed directly into the bloodstream, either from a bite, a scratch, or a sting.
For example, you could *drink* a glass of snake venom and be perfectly fine (please don’t try this)
Toxin [is a movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1993396/), Poison [is a band](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_(band)), and Venom’s [an antihero](https://www.marvel.com/characters/venom-eddie-brock/in-comics).
Sorry, someone had to do it… 😉
It really depends who you ask because different fields use different definitions of these terms and they may or may not be sub categories of one another.
For example one set of definitions might be:
A poison is a substance which is chemically dangerous when you’re exposed to it in some form. This is a very broad category and does not specify how the exposure must take place.
A toxin is a poison of biological origin. This is also a fairly broad category and does not specify how you must be exposed.
A venom is a toxin that is produced by an animal and used as a weapon. There is some movement about a category called “toxungens” to differentiate between toxins that are delivered by causing a wound and toxins that are simply put on the surface but I don’t know how widely accepted that is.
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