JAMA wrote up a decent and very readable review about Ricin a few years ago.

Box 1 sums it up pretty well:

Background

Ricin is a toxin derived from the castor bean plant Ricinus communis.
Poisoning can occur via ingestion, inhalation, or injection.
Ricin poisoning can have a presentation similar to gastroenteritis or respiratory illnesses.
Epidemiologic clues include increased number of patients seeking care, unexpected progression of symptoms, or a credible threat of ricin release in the community.
Person-to-person transmission does not occur.
Ricin has been procured for use as a terrorist weapon.
Inhalation and injection are considered to be the most lethal routes of exposure.

Clinical Findings

Ingestion: Mild poisoning can result in nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and/or abdominal pain. In moderate to severe poisoning, gastrointestinal tract symptoms can progress (4-36 hours) to hypotension, liver and renal dysfunction, and possibly death.
Inhalation: Illness can occur within 8 hours and include cough, dyspnea, arthralgias, and fever, and can progress to respiratory distress and death.
Injection: Initial (ie, ≤6 hours) symptoms can include generalized weakness and myalgias; progression of illness (24-36 hours) can include vomiting, fever, hypotension, and/or multiorgan failure and death.

Laboratory Testing

No clinically validated methods are available to detect ricin in biological fluids.
Analytic methods for detecting ricin (in blood) and ricinine (in urine) may be available through reference laboratories (the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in an emergency response setting.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Laboratory Response Network laboratories conduct tests to detect ricin in environmental samples.

Recommended Treatment

Treatment is mainly supportive and includes intravenous fluid and vasopressors (eg, dopamine) for hypotension.
Activated charcoal should be administered to persons with known or suspected ricin ingestion if vomiting has not begun and airway is secure.
Gastric lavage may be considered if ingestion has occurred in an hour or less.
If a credible threat exists, patients with illness consistent with ricin poisoning should be observed for illness progression.
The regional poison control center should be contacted for individualized care and further management.

Prevention and Reporting in the United States

All known or suspected cases of ricin exposure should be reported to the regional poison control center ([800]222-1222) and local and state health departments.

And one point to keep in mind: Preparing and distributing ricin is a non-trivial task—particularly into a form that one could distribute by air.

The LD50 (the amount of the poison sufficient to kill 50% of those exposed) for ingested ricin for mice is about 30mg/kg. An adult human is about 70kg, so that would be 2.1 grams of ricin—that’s like 10 Ibuprofen pills, enough to notice in a drink.

Mice aren’t little people. The lowest dose thought to be fatal in humans by ingestion is 1mg/kg, with the highest estimate ranging up to 20mg/kg. Even 70mg of ricin would be quite a bit to dissolve secretly in a drink.

By inhalation, the dose is about a thousand-fold less— 5 micrograms per kg. But, as I noted above, preparing ricin in a form suitable for distribution by air is a much more difficult task.

Update:
My comparison of 2.1g of ricin to 10 Ibuprofen pills seems confusing to people. Ricin is only a fraction of the castor bean. Someone attempting to purify it at home seems unlikely to get anywhere close to 100% purity. Like Ibuprofen pills, ricin prepared outside of a lab or an industrial chemical company is going to be mixed with a lot of inert compounds. Hence my rough estimate of 10 or so pills worth to get 2.1g of the active ingredient. If you’re looking for a lesson on metrics, tryXKCD.

Jonathan Golob is an actual doctor.

35 replies on “Ricin”

  1. I know it feeds the terroristic aims of the sender of these letters, but why the fuck is the Stranger the only media in town with a word about this???

  2. The only way you could pull off something like this, especially on 11 bars, would be with the element of surprise on your side. That makes me guess this a-hole is bluffing. Not that you can count on that.

  3. Yeah, I don’t see how someone is going to sneak poison into the drinks of 55 people after publicly announcing their intention to do so. Not bloody likely!

    On the other hand, someone cuckoo enough to write those letters has probably had suspicious behavior in the past that will lead the authorities straight to their door, as in the case of the Unabomber.

  5. He’s counting on public confusion between anthrax and ricin. Fortunately, there’s no such thing as chemical or biological weapons.

  8. I am a science nerd, and have to point out that it is not a good idea to scale up LD50 by weigh. The doseage will depend on metabolic variation, organ size, etc.

  9. Fnarf–

    Hence the post. JAMA is by no means my favorite journal, but they do this sort of article so well.

    Kateness–
    “Mice aren’t little people.” Yup.

  11. Jonathan, with your background, I would have thought you would know this, but apparently not: a pill that says “200mg” weighs a lot more thatn 200 mg; it contains 200 mg of the active chemical but most of a pill is just buffer substance. 2g of ricin is nowhere near as big as 10 ibuprofin pills, and 70mg would be a barely visible trace amount. It would be no problem to hide that much in a drink, even if it didn’t dissolve.

    By the way, here’s another scary thing about ricin: it’s not too hard to prepare without sophisticated equipment. You can get it from castor beans.

  12. From the Q13Fox website (the only mainstream media to mention this so far)

    “Seattle police say they are taking this threat very seriously and are working with multiple agencies to resolve this case.”

  13. Okay… so it’s hard to get people to eat enough of it. What about snorting? Is it possible for someone to cut coke with it?

  14. It’s on the King 5 website now as well and mentions both the Seattle police and the FBI but says the joint terrorism task force isn’t involved yet.

    I was going to say something similar to David, but I didn’t want to contradict anything Mr. Science says because he makes me nervous. I’ll just add that it may be difficult but not impossible to manufacture ricin but it is a big risk to the person doing it (for example the guy in the Las Vegas hotel room).

    I think at the very least someone could, if all their ducks were in a row, pull off making a bunch of people very sick. The question is if the purpose of writing the letters was to make people fearful or to actually carry out the threat. In which case, it was probably kind of dumb to send the letters ahead of time.

  16. PopTart’s comment contains the key insight that explains why the police probably aren’t too worked up about this danger: Anyone who seriously wanted to do this and was smart enough to pull it off wouldn’t make his task harder by advertising it beforehand. Almost certainly these letters are from someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t pull do the deed, but saw in it an easy way to instill fear in some people he hates.

  17. Paranoid @ 13: If you are snorting white powders you got from strangers in bars, there is a very long list of risks you should be more worried about that ricin poisoining.

  19. “Anyone who seriously wanted to do this and was smart enough to pull it off wouldn’t make his task harder by advertising it beforehand.”

    Why do people believe that a crazy person will behave rationally in the prosecution of a hate crime? You sound like a smart guy, David, I’m sorry to pick out a quote from you but it was handy.

    It’s likely the person is just a blow hard, but also possible that he thinks himself smarter than the police, or worse, on a divine mission. Regardless, the threat in itself is a crime and should be taken seriously.

  20. Isn’t Ricin the planet in Star Trek where Picard had to walk around with a big phallic totem pole that signaled his desire to, you know … ?

  21. @11 — even going with J’s numbers — if 2.1 g of ricin is the same as 10 ibuprofen pills (are we talking normal 200 mg version or the 800 mg super ibu pill?), 70 mg of ricin (enough to kill a person) would be one third of one pill. I could crush that in a drink. Unless it was one third of one 800 mg ibu super pill, then no.

    God, who’s making up these numbers?

  22. Let’s not forget that injection is — by far — the most dangerous way to administer the stuff.

    The KGB executed a man with just the amount of ricin that could be injected into a tiny hole in a BB. They administered the BB via a glorified pellet gun.

  25. Honestly, the only way this person could target this and have it work is to go for the airborne route – putting it into individuals’ drinks would just not be effective given the number of sites they say they’re targeting. All the sites might want to make sure that their ventilation systems are reasonably secure or keep an eye on them.

    Given that they say they’ll do “at least five” targets at each location, airborne may not be the plan… but it’s a good thing to keep in mind.

  28. In January its so nice
    While slipping on the slidey ice
    To sip hot chicken soup with ricin
    Sippin’ once, sippin’ twice
    Sippin’ chicken soup with ricin!

  30. You know, you can find many lethal things, some of which can destroy entire buildings, just under your kitchen sink and in your bathroom cabinets. And in your laundry room.

    Just saying.

  31. @14, @16

    However… If they’re in it for the attention and celebrity, they might realized that after an attack, lots of goofballs will come out of the woodwork and claim credit. Sending the letters ahead of time helps to make sure that doesn’t fly. And if he succeeds even after giving warnings, then pulling it off increases his stature.

    I think it’s fake because the letter is so preciously written and overly melodramatic. But you never know…

  33. So how often do you see people doing lines in the back room of your average gay bar? That seems like a good way to distribute the stuff by inhalation. Don’t know how common that is but I think I would lay off the nose candy if I lived in Seattle.

  34. There’s a potentially fatal error in real-life scientist Jonathan Golob’s research. The generally-accepted LD50 for ricin in humans is at best 30 MICROgrams(mcg)/kilogram(kg) – not 30 MILLIgrams/kilogram.

    In short, he’s off by a factor of 1,000 – 10,000 (most sources give LD50’s in the 3.0 mcg/kg ballpark).

    Did nobody bother to check this?

    google ricin + ld50 + microgram

  35. RonK, you need help with reading comprehension.

    The LD50 for ingested ricin (like you’d get in a drink) is a thousand fold higher than for inhaled or injected. As it says in my post. My numbers are correct, coming from a carefully curated medical site. Yours are from random shit found on google. You fail.

    Don’t believe me? From TFA to which I linked: “The median lethal dose (LD50) in mice is 30 mg/kg, or approximately 1000-fold higher than by injection or inhalation.”

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