Transcript of
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide is a gas, just like oxygen or nitrogen or carbon dioxide.
It's produced when any fuel that contains carbon,
including gas we burn at home,
or biomass, or biofuel, as we call it nowadays,
or coal or oil,
any of those that burns without enough oxygen present,
what happens is the carbon in the fuel combines with oxygen in the air
to produce carbon monoxide, which is very toxic and dangerous.
If there was more oxygen it would form carbon dioxide,
two oxygen atoms to one carbon, which is not toxic in the way carbon monoxide is.
So it's a toxic gas produced by anything that burns when it burns poorly.
So carbon monoxide effectively stops you taking up oxygen.
So to say it chokes you doesn't sound quite right, but it has the same effect.
It reduces the oxygen available to the heart and brain
and that's what kills you.
We must think in terms of how much carbon monoxide we're worrying about.
Let's think about the sort of levels we're likely to find in people's houses.
At those levels, they're likely to be pretty low, in actual fact.
And so what will it produce? Headaches; people feel sick or nauseous;
they feel very tired; they tend to drop off to sleep;
they lose concentration; they become confused.
And you see already the danger,
because as those symptoms creep up on you, the confusion increases,
and your ability to do something about it declines.
And so the classic example of someone going to bed in a room
with a source of carbon monoxide,
which might be an un-flued gas fire not working properly,
or a blocked chimney with a fire in the grate,
then they fall asleep and don't notice that they're being poisoned.
And that's what kills them. At much higher concentrations,
people collapse almost at once and die very quickly.
But at the sort of concentrations we are thinking about in the UK,
then although they can be dangerous,
the symptoms and signs tend to creep up on you.
Battery-operated alarms, which you could call mobile alarms,
that detect carbon monoxide, can be very useful
if you're going away from home in a caravan or a camper or a trailer.
Any appliance that burns indoors
should be checked regularly by a qualified engineer.
There are four things to remember
about preventing poisoning from carbon monoxide.
They are: (1) Chimneys and flues should be clean and working well.
(2) Rooms should be well ventilated.
(3) All devices that burn fossil fuels, for example, gas, oil or coke,
should be serviced regularly by competent engineers.
(4) A carbon monoxide alarm is a useful thing that may save your life,
but it is not, repeat not, a substitute for having devices serviced properly.
