Poisons
The poisonings a rebuilding community is most likely to meet: where each comes from, how it shows, and the first thing to do.
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Most poisonings in a rebuilding community come from things it makes itself: smoke in a closed room, the first spirit off a still, lye, lime, metal fume, and wild food misidentified. This guide is the basic set. It says what to do first and names the hospital antidote where one exists, without doses. Medical content on this site has not yet been reviewed by a qualified practitioner (CIV-054).
First, for any poisoning
- Stop the exposure. Get the person into fresh air, take off contaminated clothing, and keep anyone else from the same source.
- Rinse skin and eyes with running water for 20 minutes.
- Do not make them vomit, above all after a caustic or a fuel: it burns the throat a second time or puts fuel into the lungs.
- Keep the container, the plant or the mushroom, so whoever treats them knows what it was.
- Watch breathing. Lay an unconscious person who is breathing on their side.
The common ones
The poisonings most likely where people are rebuilding, the ones they cause themselves first.
| Poison | Where it comes from | Signs | What to do | Hospital antidote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carbon monoxide | Fires, stoves, charcoal and engines in closed spaces | Headache, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, confusion; often a whole household at once | Fresh air at once; move everyone out | Oxygen |
| Methanol | The first spirit off a still (the heads), fuels, antifreeze | Drunkenness, then after 6–24 hours vomiting, fast breathing, blurred vision and blindness. As little as 10 ml can blind or kill | Treat as an emergency even while the person seems well. Throw away the first run of every distillation: see distilling | Fomepizole, or ethanol |
| Caustics: lye, quicklime | Soap and lime making | Burns of skin, eyes, mouth and throat | Rinse 20 minutes with water; do not make them vomit | None: supportive care |
| Death cap and destroying angel | Mushrooms eaten by mistake | Nothing for 6–24 hours, then vomiting and diarrhoea, a false recovery, and liver failure by days 3–5 | Hospital at once, even before symptoms. See the foraging guide | None reliable |
| Water hemlock, hemlock | Roots and stems of white-flowered umbellifers | Water hemlock: seizures within an hour. Hemlock: weakness, then paralysis | Hospital; keep the airway open | None: supportive care |
| Lead | Smelting, old paint and pipes, lead-glazed pots | Slow: anaemia, belly pain; in children, lasting damage to learning. No known safe level | Remove the source; never store acid food in lead-glazed pots | Chelation, in hospital |
| Arsenic | Some wells; fumes from roasting sulfide ores | Slow: skin patches and hard spots, then cancers | Change the water source: boiling concentrates arsenic | None for long exposure |
| Organophosphate pesticides | Farm chemicals | Small pupils, sweating, drooling, vomiting, twitching, slow heartbeat | Take off clothes, wash the skin, hospital | Atropine |
| Snakebite | Venomous snakes | Pain and swelling, bleeding, or weakness and drooping eyelids, by species | Keep calm and still, a pressure pad on the bite, immobilise the limb, carry to hospital. No tourniquet, no cutting, no sucking | Antivenom |
Where to go next
This page covers what you are most likely to meet. It is not a field guide, and on identification that difference can kill you. These are the works that go further — chosen because they can be held offline.
Still to come
Illustrations carry a technique further than prose, but some things only move well. Recorded here rather than left implicit.
- Regional venomous snakes and scorpions, with photographs, and where antivenom is held