What's that 'Bright Orange' Chemical?

As reported by NPR this morning, the U.S. Supreme court hears the case of Carol Anne Bond, convicted of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention through her repeated attempts to poison her husband's mistress with two industrial chemicals. From NPR:

"Bond stole toxic chemicals from the chemical manufacturing company where she worked and ordered other chemicals over the Internet. She combined the chemicals into a compound that is potentially lethal in small amounts — and is also bright orange. Bond spread the toxic material on her rival's mail, mailbox, front doorknob, car door and other surfaces.

But because of the orange color, the mistress, Myrlinda Haynes, easily spotted the chemicals and avoided any injury except a thumb burn."

 I tried to look for information on the identity of this "bright orange" substance. Digging into the SCOTUS brief, it seems Ms. Bond purchased two chemicals:

". . .petitioner [Bond] decided to punish Haynes. She purchased some potassium

dichromate (a chemical commonly used in printing photographs) from Amazon.com, and stole a bottle of 10, 10-chloro-10-H-phenoxarsine (an arsenic-based chemical) from her employer. Petitioner knew the chemicals were irritants and believed that, if Haynes touched them, she would develop an uncomfortable rash."

According to this oral argument from 2011, Ms. Bond had been a microbiology technician with Rohm & Haas, from whom she nabbed the arsine compound. What I haven't been able to figure out from the stories or briefings is whether she intended the combination of two potentially poisonous, irritant substances to function apart, or to perform some sort of solid-phase oxidation to, for example, phenoxarsine oxide (a known antimicrobial compound).

This case needs more chemical context...paging Deborah Blum!

WWWTP? Operatic Chemistry in the Boston Globe

Has anyone seen the fantastic writeup by Carolyn Johnson in the Boston Globe today?

Johnson covers the J. Chem. Ed. recently penned by Prof. João Paulo André, of the Universidade de Minho to celebrate the storied use of poisons in opera. I hadn't realized, honestly, that this rich history involved poisons from such a wide variety of plants, minerals, and animals, or that specific references to each substance can be found in the libretti. Fascinating!

Unfortunately, the graphic that accompanies the story takes a few chemical liberties, which I've circled:

(Update 4/7/13 - I should point out that more structures are right than wrong here, which a commenter points out is more than you usually see in mainstream media. Kudos to the BG for covering the article the way they have)

I've written a short note to the author, reprinted below, and I will post any response I receive.

Dear Carolyn:

Good afternoon! My name is See Arr Oh (a pseudonym), and I blog at Just Like Cooking, a chemistry blog aimed at general-interest audiences.

http://justlikecooking.blogspot.com

I noticed your article in today's Globe, and I want to applaud you for your outreach. The article is well-written, and the science seems solid.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/04/06/treasury-opera-poisonings/gKPw3zoiVNx7mZeRK1p0KL/story.html

However, the image that accompanies your article includes several inaccurate structures for the discussed poisons. For example, the structures of mannitol don't show explicit stereochemistry (3D structure); these might well be glucose drawn this way. 

Scheele's Green is actually a copper complex; trimethylarsine is the poisonous gas that evolves from the dye. Arsenic trioxide and mercuric sulfide aren't actually monomeric, as drawn, but adopt several different crystal forms involving multiple As and Hg atoms, respectively.

Finally, the neurotoxin shown in the "snake venom" box is not actually venom, rather, it's anatoxin-a, from blue-green algae. 

Please consider changes to the illustration. If you need anything further, don't hesitate to contact me at seearroh_AT_gmail.com

Sincerely,

See Arr Oh

Chicken Chemophobia

A recent New York Times Op-Ed spot made the rounds late last night on Twitter. Full of inflammatory language, it seemed wholly bent on scaring the heck out of anyone reading it. The title - "Arsenic in Our Chicken?" - didn't exactly calm me down.

Is this in my chicken? Only very, very little
Credit: slashfood.org

Well, I'm a scientist, so let's look at this rationally. First things first: here are links to the two papers referenced in the study, one from Environmental Science and Technology (ACS), and one from Science of the Total Environment (Elsevier). (Editor's Note - Whenever a columnist feels pressed to validate his opinion with the words 'published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal,' I turn on the skepticism). 


In both papers, analytical chemists take a peek at feather meal, a poultry industry byproduct, for compounds you might expect from factory farms: antibiotics, stimulants, and antihistamines. A surprise dark horse was encountered in arsenic, which apparently caught everyone so off guard that they required a full second paper to adequately discuss it. 


Glancing quickly at both journals' major tables, it's clear we're talking small amounts here: parts per billion (ppb), which for EST means ng / g, and for STE ug / kg. To put this in perspective, let's imagine we had a swimming pool, which we filled with 1000 L (~270 gallons) of water, which will weigh 1000 kg (density of water = 1 g / mL @ room temp). Now, what's a ppb for this scale? One milligram of material, or about what you'd add if a snowflake fell into your pool.

Better start eating....
Source: Home of Science Wonders

Overall, the article smacks of rampant chemophobia and fear-mongering. While the individual compounds, in acute (high) doses might be cause for concern, the detected values aren't near that much. The LD50 (oral, mouse) for arsenic, the value at which half of tested lab animals die, is 145 mg / kg; the maximum arsenic detected in feather meal = 4 mg / kg! This leap of logic contains an even more far-fetched premise: you'd have to eat two pounds of feathers just to take in that much!


Remember: infinitesimally tiny amounts of several "bad" substances float by you every day, but you don't often see people dropping dead.


Maybe that's the reason that this NYT reporter buries his lede - a quote from his source, Dr. K. Nachmann, an author on both papers: "We haven't found anything that is an immediate health concern." 


And look, now I've gone and buried it, too.


(Update, 12:09 4/5 - Commenters on Twitter point out that a topic I did not address - detection of banned antibiotics - could be cause for concern. I agree with that point)