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Comment Toxic Doses of Acetamenaphen (Score 1) 631

Over at the chemistry Daily Website they are talking about much larger doses than are being bandied about here:
http://www.chemistrydaily.com/chemistry/Acetaminophen

However, paracetamol single doses above 10 grams or chronic doses over 5 grams per day in a well nourished non-consumer of alcohol, or above 4 grams per day in a poorly nourished consumer of alcohol, can cause significant injury to the liver. Without timely treatment, paracetamol overdoses can lead to liver failure and death within days. Because of the wide over-the-counter availability of the drug, it is sometimes used in suicide attempts.

Then later on they discuss some of the risk factors:
Risk factors for toxicity

The toxic dose of paracetamol is highly variable. In adults, single doses above 10 grams or 140 mg/kg have a reasonable likelihood of causing toxicity. In adults, single doses of more than 25 grams have a high risk of lethality. Toxicity can also occur when multiple smaller doses within 24 hours exceeds these levels, or even with chronic ingestion of smaller doses. However, unintentional paracetamol overdose in children rarely causes illness or death. This may be due in part to the immature cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme system in children. Excessive consumption of alcohol can impair liver function and increase the potential toxicity of paracetamol. For this reason, other analgesics such as aspirin or ibuprofen are recommended for hangovers.

Some individuals are more susceptible to hepatotoxicity, with toxic doses as low as 4 g/day, and death with as little as 6 g/day. Fasting is a risk factor, possibly because of depletion of hepatic glutathione reserves. It is well documented that concomitant use of the CYP2E1 inducer isoniazid increases the risk of hepatotoxicity, though whether CYP2E1 induction is related to the hepatotoxicity in this case is unclear (Crippin, 1993; Nolan et al., 1994). Chronic alcoholism, which also induces CYP2E1, is also well known to increase the risk of paracetamol-induced hepatotoxicity (Zimmerman & Maddrey, 1995). Concomitant use of other drugs which induce CYP enzymes such as antiepileptics (including carbamazepine, phenytoin, barbiturates, etc) have also been reported as risk factors.

Comment Re:Ban how to host a murder while you're at it. (Score 1) 473

2050 BC is the Bronze Age around almost all the world.
If Thogg is taking a month to figure out how to bash your skull in with a rock you likely have nothing to worry about.
You'd be about 8000 years after the neolithic agricultural revolution general tool use had been around for quite a while by then.

That said, I wouldn't be inviting Thogg over for tea.

Comment What is the land area of the Earth (Score 1) 207

When I look up the total land area of the earth i get different numbers ranging from 148M sq. km to 153M sq. km.
So an average of 150.5M sq. km + or minus @2.5M sq. km or @965k sq. miles

So they're mapping to less than the margin of error for different sources as to the total land area.
But what I find interesting is that there appears to be variations equal to three times the area of Alaska (656k sq. Miles).

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml

Comment Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard (Score 1) 294

Sounds like your experience is not unlike mine in working on SAP installations.
Businesses need to change long running business processes to model the software's processes/templates.
There's often a lot of resistance to changing these processes; usually for no reason other than institutional inertia.
If you don't have buy-in from the top for the need to make these changes then the implementation is almost doomed to failure.

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