ELI5- What is the difference between Toxin, Poison, and Venom?
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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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