Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

lief_meisje83

Doc, how does this work po?
i've heard a lot of it occured inside a car with the windows shut and the a/c turned on and stuff?

then slowly daw the victim will fall asleep or sumthin like that. please explain this further, THANKS!

Ira

Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless and tasteless gas. It's produced by the incomplete burning of any material containing hyrdocarbon, such as gasoline, oil, propane, wood, coal, and the car's combustion engine, among others. If your engine/oven/etc. are working properly, the gas or oil is burned more or less completely, and the resulting fumes are mainly CO2 + H20. If let's say your oven or airconditioning unit is not working properly and your kitchen or car doesn't have good circulation, carbon monoxide (CO) is produced instead. It's the lack of that one oxygen atom that causes the trouble.

The human body's hemoglobin has around 200x more affinity to carbon monoxide than it does to oxygen. So given an environment with relatively abundant CO, the hemoglobin will prefer to attach itself to the CO rather than the O2. This results in our body replacing the much needed oxygen with carbon monoxide in our bloodstream, causing greater or lesser levels of hypoxia depending on the intensity and duration of exposure. Symptoms of low-level carbon monoxide poisoning are easily mistaken for those of the common cold or exhaustion: throbbing headache, flushing, irritability, nausea, and dizziness. As your body's CO level increases, more serious symptoms develop, like seizures, confusion, altered mentation, and lack of coordination, progressing eventually coma and death if help is not sought in time.