It sounds like someone was up to something terrible in a Las Vegas. Police found ricin in a hotel room. They haven’t said if they know who the poison belongs to but they are checking it out. Can you imagine?

What ricin is…

* Ricin is a poison that can be made from the waste left over from processing castor beans.
* It can be in the form of a powder, a mist, or a pellet, or it can be dissolved in water or weak acid.
* It is a stable substance. For example, it is not affected much by extreme conditions such as very hot or very cold temperatures.

How you could be exposed to ricin

* It would take a deliberate act to make ricin and use it to poison people. Accidental exposure to ricin is highly unlikely.
* People can breathe in ricin mist or powder and be poisoned.
* Ricin can also get into water or food and then be swallowed.
* Pellets of ricin, or ricin dissolved in a liquid, can be injected into people’s bodies.
* Depending on the route of exposure (such as injection or inhalation), as little as 500 micrograms of ricin could be enough to kill an adult. A 500-microgram dose of ricin would be about the size of the head of a pin. A greater amount would likely be needed to kill people if the ricin were swallowed.
* In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian writer and journalist who was living in London, died after he was attacked by a man with an umbrella. The umbrella had been rigged to inject a poison ricin pellet under Markov’s skin.
* Some reports have indicated that ricin may have been used in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s and that quantities of ricin were found in Al Qaeda caves in Afghanistan.
* Ricin poisoning is not contagious. It cannot be spread from person to person through casual contact.

I don’t think I like ricin.