Reading the tube of Crest ™ toothpaste as I was brushing me teeth this morning, I was reminded of a question I’d been waiting for the restorationon SDMB to ask:
There’s a warning to call the poison control center if one swallows more toothpaste than is needed for brushing your teeth.
So, how much toothpaste would one have to swallow to be get an LD?
My lovely wife worked for a time in the toxicology business…that is, torturing bunnies. She did a study that involved toothpaste and determined the LD50 (the dose at which 50% of the test population died) was something like 2kg / kg of body weight. The toothpaste itself wasn’t fatal, it was hte sheer volume you needed to consume. I think the LD50 for Oreo’s is about the same.
Toothpaste is, however, fairly caustic and did cause irritation in the mucus membranes of the test animals.
Ask me about glow-sticks…
If I’m reading that right, I’d need to consume 324lbs. of toothpaste to kill myself… so why the poison control warning?
I mean, I could kill myself by eating concrete more easily, which doesn’t get a PCC warning…
The issue isn’t usually adults, but very young children and fluoride.
2004 data: 1 death, 440 ER cases, 24,180 exposures reported to poison call centers. Most are kids under 6.
“Death may result from ingesting as little as 2 g of fluoride in an adult and 16 mg/kg in children. Symptoms may appear with 3-5 mg/kg of fluoride.”
Your glow sticks. Tell me about them, please.
From my bathroom, I find numbers of 0.15% (of a 4.2 ounce tube) of Oral-B’s “Stages” (children’s toothpaste) to 0.24% (of 4.6 ounces) of Colgate Total Whitening. So that’s .0063 ounces or .179 grams in the kid’s stuff and .01104 ounces, or .313 grams in my adult toothpaste - which, to be clear, isn’t a tube of paste, but that more liquid stuff that comes in a plastic container. If someone has a traditional tube, even I can do that math.
The LD50 for sodium fluoride in rats is 52 mg/kg when taken orally. I don’t think anyone’s done an LD50 on humans, for obvious reasons, but assuming the LD50 of sodium fluoride in rats is the same as humans, an average adult weighing 180 pounds would need to eat 4.246 grams of fluoride to risk death. That’s about 13 and a half containers of my toothpaste.
My daughter, who weighs just 12.700 kg, would need to eat 0.660 g of sodium fluoride, or that found in 2 of my containers of toothpaste. I suppose if one lived in a multi-toothpaste-tube home, it is worth keeping the stuff well out of reach of the little ones.
Oh, sure, I do all the math and then find this:
http://www.vasmiles.com/html/dentalnews/03naturalcare.html
So seems I was right. Yay.
Okay, what about glow-sticks? My kid’s teenaged friends like to bust them open and smear the glow juice on their skin and even on their teeth. They’re not dead yet, but some of them aren’t too bright. 
Nothing about the LD50, unfortunately.
So what can I conclude from all your guy’s numbers?
If I find my 2 year-old in the bathroom with an empty tube of Crest is it time to go to the emergency room?
Depends on the size of the tube and the child. If it’s a tube of less than 6 ounces, the kid might not die, but might be very sick and need to go to the ER anyhow. A new tube larger than 8 ounces and it’s probably call 911 time, and definitely Poison Control for further advice.
As the tube says, any time *more than the quantity used for brushing *is swallowed, call Poison Control and/or your kids doctor. They’ll take it from there.
As a general precaution, use only fluoride free baby toothpaste for toddlers and keep the adult toothpaste up where they can’t reach it. They shouldn’t be using fluoridated toothpaste until they learn how to spit effectively, and then supervise brushing for a couple more years to make sure they have the hand eye coordination and judgement to use only a pea sized amount of fluoride containing toothpaste. (This is more for avoiding chronic over fluoridation and stained teeth, but it’s worth mentioning anyhow.)
When my younger daughter was a toddler, we were all out shopping one day and suddenly she vomited. I took her outside the store, where she did it again. And again. As it happens, the pediatrician’s office was on the way home, so we got in the car and started off. She proceeded to barf a some more in the car. My husband says, “That smells like toothpaste! Has she been eating toothpaste?” “Oh, yes,” says the older child, who has been silent up until this point. “She eats toothpaste all the time.” So we went home and sure enough a formerly full tube of Crest was now half gone. I called & described the situation to our pediatricain. “Don’t worry,” he said with a barely smothered chuckle. “If she’s vomiting like that she doesn’t have enough left in her to be a problem. But keep it on a higher shelf from now on.” Oddly, to this day daughter the younger hates the taste of mint.
MLS, was she, err, foaming at the mouth? Cuz that’s what I pictured.
As one of those people who gets canker sores from toothpaste with SLS, I can totally believe it would be a serious stomach irritant in large doses.
So my wife, the ex-toxicologist, got a customer request to do an irritation study for the stuff inside glow sticks…a vaginal irritation study.
Good news! The glowy stuff is not irritating…the little bits of broken glass, on the other hand…
In case you are interested…they use female Beagles.
Ya know, that makes me a little more sympathetic to the PETA folks.
Anyhoo, I just wanted to say that if you brought your kid in to see us in the ER for toothpaste ingestion, the first thing we’d do is call poison contol for the 411, there are a relatively few substances that the ER docs know off the top of their heads.
Now there is some medical experimentation that I would happily participate in.
i swallowed 2 teaspoons of toothpaste & 1 cap of mouth wash with flouride. Is that fatal?
Call 1-800-222-1222, the Poison Control Center.
Apparently not yet. Keep us posted.
Well this is a zombie thread…:eek:
Does fluoride exposure over time cause cumulative damage?
You could always drink milk before you used toothpaste to protect you from the fluoride. (Since it binds to the calcium in the milk to make calcium fluoride.) Actually I think you can do it immediately afterwards as well.