Some varients of botulinum poison are so deadly that even a few nanograms can kill a person. How does a few nanograms of anything kill someone?
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What you have to get out of your head is weight or mass of biochemical toxins. It’s not weight but numbers. Cyanide kills you when a certain amount of the cyanide ion is present throughout the body to arrest cellular respiration. That amount is based roughly on multiplying the number of mitochondria in the body by atoms of CN-. There are a lot of mitochondria but mitochondria are huge compared to a carbon-nitrogen atom. A nanogram of cyanide might still be a trillion times a million molecules of CN. Botulinum toxin is no different although it’s much larger than cyanide. Each muscle in your body is controlled by a few molecular switches. And there aren’t that many muscle cells , maybe a few billion? But a billion molecules is nothing when you try to weigh them. A billion molecules of say insulin would weigh so little no scale on earth could detect it – in fact that’s about a nanogram. So a nanogram of botulinum toxin could be visualized as keys. Trillions of keys. And each key can lock down a muscle cell. Lock enough cells into the off position and you stop breathing or your heart stops pumping
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