How Deadly Is Ricin?

The arrest in London of 5 N African men (who apparently had been storing the poison Ricin) puzzles me. Ricin (derived from the castor bean plant) is supposedly a very deadly poison-it was used by Bulgarian agents to kill an anti-communist BBC announcer in London years ago.
So, how poisonous is the stuff, and how would you use it as a weapon? Can it be dissolved in drinking water? Plus, how hard is it to make huge quantities of the stuff?:rolleyes:

http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/toxicagents/ricin/ricin.html

According to this site, ricin is just about the most deadly naturally occuring substance out there. It apparently can be produced without much effort at all and methods of getting into the population don’t appear to be too complicated.

Slight hijack - but were these the Bulgarians with the poisoned umbrellas in 1978 or thereabouts? It seemed sort of comical sat the time, although of course it wasn’t.

Yes, the poisoned ubrella thing was Ricin (very nearly misdiagnosed as death from Septicemia).

Apparently a single molecule of Ricin entering a living cell is enough to shut down protein synthesis and kill it.

A related hijack; Does it have any legitimate use for the common man? Is their any reason (other then “I want to kill a bunch of people”) that a person would have some of this stuff at home? (I dunno, maybe it gets stains out of silk or something…)

In small doses it’s a laxative (active ingredient in Castor Oil).

Castor oil does not contain Ricin; or at least the laxative effect of castor oil is not due to Ricin being the active ingredient (it may contain minute traces). Although I’m pretty sure that there are sources out there claiming it is.

Indeed, I was basing my assertion on this cite, which may be wrong.

The lethal dose in the Markov case was 450mg. That’s not a lot really.

CNN says it’s far less deadly than anthrax:

Surely you mean 450 micrograms. I don’t see as it’d be practical to inject half a gram with a trick umbrella. A quick search for the ld-50 of ricin turns up numbers in the 1-30 microgram/kg range. That’d be consistant with a 450 microgram does, and be more consistant with the materials reputation as a powerful toxin.

Sorry, that’s what I meant.

From this site:

See, I always said that salt is bad for you.

jjimm
…this cite, which may be wrong …
“In very small doses, Ricin only causes the human digestive tract to convulse- hence the laxative effect of castor oil”.

I’m not convinced either. A skim of sources, such as this one, suggest that it’s down to the oil’s main constitutent: a fatty acid oil that hydrolizes in the gut to ricinoleic acid or its salt sodium ricinoleate (a soap, in fact) which - according to what version you read - then gives you the trots by acting as a direct irritant and/or stopping the gut wall re-absorbing water.

What’s the betting we have scares now about anything with “ricin-” in the name? For instance, sodium ricinoleate is a bog-standard and throughly safe emulsifier used in toothpastes (the “SR” in Gibbs SR).

According to a CNN report I saw the other day, Al Qaeda has done some research into ricin. In notes found at an Al Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, it’s claimed that the ricin from seven castor beans is sufficient to kill a baby.

Combined with mangetout’s data, that suggests that there’s only a few micrograms of ricin in the typical castor bean. That is, until someone genetically engineers a super castor bean with more ricin :eek:

Without the context, this is like comparing apples to green beans, never mind oranges. They must have been referring to the “mass destruction” potential of the two substances. A given amount of anthrax could potentially kill many more people than the same amount of ricin, because anthrax is contagious. It doesn’t require that a victim have any direct exposure to the source of the infection, whereas ricin must be directly “consumed” (ingested/inhaled/absorbed).

Davebear hit the crucial distinction; anthrax can reproduce itself, whereas ricin can’t. That’s not to say that ricin wouldn’t be a very dangerous toxin indeed.

The toxicity of ricin is also very dependent upon its route of entry into the body; it requires much more of it to be lethal when introduced orally (~1 milligram/kilogram of body weight) than when injected (the famous umbrella pellet probably contained less than 3 micrograms/kilogram).

Ricin can be exceptionally deadly; I think it is just behind plutonium in the Guinness Book of World Records in terms of lethality. I’m reading a cite (Balint, 1974) – I don’t know if it’s available online – that says that 1 kg of ricin would be lethal to 3.6 million people as opposed to 1 kg of cyanide’s 116,000.
RR

I have literally hundreds of Castor Bean plants growing in my backyard. They are pretty much weeds where I live. According to the same site mentioned earlier, one Castor Bean can kill a baby. I can’t find a cite, but I remember reading that about 7 beans will kill an adult. Maybe that was confused.

Not sure how such things are measured (amoutn needed to kill you, chances of recovery after exposure, time it takes to die after exposure, etc.). However, while Ricin is certainly quite dangerous I think Botulism Toxin is ranked as the most lethal thing there is.

Source: http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/toxicagents/ricin/ricin.html

Source: http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic889.htm This same link also describes mortality and morbidity depend on the route and amount of exposure. Look at the bottom of the page.

Source: http://www.dhfs.state.wi.us/healthtips/BCD/Ricin.htm

Source: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no4/kortepeter.htm

Not that there is a competition here or anything but again botulism seems to have Ricin beat by an order of magnitude. It may be that under the most ‘ideal’ conditions you could get 1 gram of Ricin to kill 1,000 adults. By comparison: