4 ms·
People reading/commenting seem to be misreading the 500 number. Note it's comparing to the previous number 80mg, it's not '500 pills' or '500 tablets' it is 500
by dmacedo 13y ago
People reading/commenting seem to be misreading the 500 number. Note it's comparing to the previous number 80mg, it's not '500 pills' or '500 tablets' it is 500mg.
Which is consistent with the remaining text and known literature.
- chime 13y agoIt says 500 of them. I've never heard a unit of measure like "mg" being referred to it as "them". So it makes sense to interpret that as "pills".
- lsaferite 13y agoThem, in this case, refers to the dosed mice and the fact that an animal would have to consume 500 of the mice to run into any toxicity issues. (At least that is my reading of the poorly worded sentence)
- ars 13y agoThem refers to bait doses. They are not dropping pills out of the helicopter, they are dropping bait and people are worried about other creatures eating the bait.
- scott_s 13y agoWhich is fair, but seeing as how many people were confused (I was), it's probably not a good wording.
- vilhelm_s 13y agoBut it doesn't? If the bait dose is 80mg, then 500 doses would be 40,000mg. I think they must mean 500mg -- that's consistent with the toxic dose being 200mg/kg in dogs and 10mg/kg in cats [1]. The phrasing is super bad, I wonder if it was altered by a copy-editor who added a unit but misunderstood the intended meaning. [1] http://www.ebvet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=383 http://www.ebvet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=383
- ars 13y ago> I wonder if it was altered by a copy-editor who added a unit but misunderstood the intended meaning. Someone linked to a video of this story, and if you watch it the original quote was very clearly bait doses.
- notahacker 13y agoIt's still, in addition to being irresponsibly badly worded, inaccurate. Tyenol's own research suggests an LD50 for dogs of around 1180–1450mg/kg. In other words, you'd only need around 30,000mg to probably kill a medium sized dog within a short time period, which is about 375 "bait doses". Needless to say, they can "get into trouble" on smaller doses. The manufacturer considers less than 100 "bait doses" to be an "acute overdose" for an adult human. Sure, the number of poisoned mice a dog would have to eat to suffer even mild liver poisoning is still far in excess of the number of mice a dog is likely to eat, so the implicit point that this isn't likely to poison local large mammals still stands. That doesn't excuse the lack of care in reporting those medical statistics on the part of the author/editor, however.
- DanBC 13y agoThe article needs to make that much clearer than it is - because most people reading that article are going to be confused about the number.