Is Ethanol Worth It?

"Yeah, the other thing that needs to be factored into the equation is the toxicity of methanol/HEET. I generally feel more comfortable with something less toxic…"

When I mentioned this to the Chemist friend of mine he laughed. His comment, "unless you are going to drink a quart it's not a problem". He did not believe that it toxic enough to cause any problems as long as you don't drink too much of it. BTW, methanol is present in small quantities in most alcoholic beverages. I believe champagne and cognac have the most.

Max allowable amount of methanol:

"to indicate a tolerable (“safe”) daily dose of methanol in an adult as 2 g and a toxic dose as 8 g…Thus, assuming that an adult consumes 425-ml standard measures of a drink containing 40% alcohol by volume over a period of 2 h, the maximum tolerable concentration (MTC) of methanol in such a drink would be 2% (v/v) by volume."

Taken from:

http://het.sagepub.com/content/20/11/563.abstract

Hi, Larry,

Well, I guess I’m not quite as sanguine as your chemist friend. I wouldn’t drink one drop of methanol! However, the treatment for methanol ingestion that I’ve heard of is to drink ethanol. I don’t know if that’s an old wives’ tail or what, but supposedly your liver will be so busy with the ethanol that it will ignore the methanol. I may be worried too much about methanol though. If one is reasonably careful, I think fumes and skin absorption aren’t huge threats.

By the way, I thought the video you posted the other day of your alcohol stove was interesting. The pot support needed a little work, though. ;)

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

The problem with not wanting to drink methanol is that requires that you not drink alcoholic beverages, unless you make them with a source known to be free of it. That is going to be a lot harder than it sounds. Most (all?) alcoholic beverages contain some methanol. Ever-clear probably even contains some.

The ethanol "cure" is probably a wives tail. The site I linked to stated that then amount of safe methanol did not change with the amount of ethanol consumed.

Thanks. One of these days I need to get back to that beer can stove. I have an idea for the pot support and some tuning changes (some based on the other alcohol thread, BTW) that I want to try.

"However, the treatment for methanol ingestion that I've heard of is to drink ethanol."

I treat myself with ethanol, prophylactically, for that very possibility.

–B.G.–

Be prepared, Bob. lol.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

Methanol, while fairly toxic, is not that bad compared with things like WG, or Kerosene. Your body can tolerate small, I mean small, amounts. Most fruits and vegatables have some in them. It is found in most plants, so even chewing a stalk of grass will put some in your system.

Yeah, I had heard that a goodly amount of ethanol was the best for removing excesive amounts. Something about giving your liver something else to do other than digest something that the byproducts will harm you. I don't know for sure, though.

The site I linked to stated that then amount of safe methanol did not change with the amount of ethanol consumed.

Thank you for that, Larry. That “drink your way to health” bit sounded too good to be true. If it were true, then denaturing alcohol by means of adding methanol wouldn’t work, one would think.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

Commenting on some of the topic ramifications:

I think it was on one of this site's articles that I read about the ethanol ingestion as a partial, on-the-go-while-there's-nothing-else-and-you-run-for-help solution to methanol intoxication. I'd trust that source.

Shielding a canister stove against wind efficiently, with no risk takes no more weight than for an alcohol burner. Just shield the burner section, not the jet, neither the canister, don't lay the screen on the ground.

Acutally, ethanol is how you'd be treated for methanol poisoning if you went to the hospital, either orally or by IV. It's not an old wives' tales at all. They idea is to prevent ADH metabolism of the methanol until it is naturally removed from the body. ADH enzymes should bond to the ethanol first, especially if there is more of it.
Treatment is usually recommended at upwards of 30ml methanol consumed, or when symptoms appear (sometimes this can be around the 3-4ml mark). That's quite a bit. Personally I'd worry a lot more about paint off-gassing, household cleaners, and fungus spores in your home than I would about methanol. Just don't drink the stuff.

I'm not spouting quals to be a jerk, but hopefully to get good information to people and provide some clarity. I studied chemical engineering, my work as an environmental engineer involves toxicolgy, LD50s, etc; but more relevently, I studied and taught wilderness advanced first aid courses rather intensively in a past life. And my wife is an MD, we've had this conversation before and, like any medical personnel I've run this by, we're all in agreement:

If a person or an animal has been poisoned with methanol or ethylene glycol (the non-animal-safe automotive anti-freeze – your basic bright green, sweet-tasting Prestone coolant.):

Get your patient slightly drunk. You know how many shots / wine / beer get you drunk. 3-ish drinks for an adult. Scale it by weight for a child or pet. Get them transported to medical care, but you what they'll do there? The same thing! They will use ethanol for the same reason.

If you are minutes from the hospital, DON'T give alcohol by mouth because they can give it IV and therefore they can use less and get it in their liver quicker. But if you are hours away, get them a little drunk, keep them a little drunk, monitor their safety and their airway and get them to the hospital.

How it works: It's not that the other alcohol is especially toxic in and of itself, but when metabolized in the liver, formic acid is a metabolite of methanol and is very slow to clear from the body, creating acid-base inbalances. Ethylene glycol is oxidized to glycolic acid which is, in turn, oxidized to oxalic acid, which is toxic. Ethanol acts by competing with ethylene glycol / methanol for alcohol dehydrogenase, the first enzyme in the degradation pathway. Because ethanol has a much higher affinity for alcohol dehydrogenase, it successfully blocks the breakdown of ethylene glycol into glycoaldehyde which prevents the further degradation to oxalic acid.

I started to post some medical websites, but wikipedia has good articles on both methanol and ethylene gylcol that cover all these points and is much more readable.

As to dangerous amounts: 10 ml pure methanol can cause blindess, 30 ml can kill, but 100 ml usually is required to kill. As little as 30 ml ethylene glycol has killed an adult, but 200 ml of 50/50 solution is more typically deadly. Especially for ethylene glycol, the bigger risk is to children and pets due its sweet taste and their smaller size.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled debate about alcohol stove fuels. . .

Okay, the above post is far more accurate than mine, but agrees with what I read. :^) I've leave mine anyway…

@Dave – Aren't they using Fomepizole to treat methanol poisoning now?

Doing a little more reading it appears that ethanol is sometimes used to treat methanol poisoning. It is typically given intravenously. Oral administration would greatly slow the absorption of the ethanol and therefore may not help much. You have to slow the oxidation of the methanol.

The problem with using ethanol to treat the problem is that it only slows the process. Simply drinking ethanol doesn't allow for an exacting dosage. There is no way to know how much to drink to effect a cure. I guess if you had no other choice, then why not.

Since much of the methanol poisoning use to be from "moonshine" simply ingesting ethanol while ingesting methanol won't protect from methanol poisoning.

But, I guess that treating methanol poisoning with ethanol is not a wives tale. ;^)

Awesome David, thanks.

But here's the real question: how do you know what antifreeze tastes like? ;)

I guess I shouldn't joke about that. I have a friend who traveled to Bolivia and reported that antifreeze is often added to drinks in cheap bars/clubs to get people more drunk when they can't afford to on real booze.
She had some of these "mixed drinks" and suffered no ill effects, presumably because it was consumed with a sufficient amount of ethanol. You occasionally hear of people dying from this, but I'm willing to bet a lot more people drink it than are made sick by it.

Still not a good idea.

from homedistillers.org:

Note the poor prognosis.

The fatal dose of methanol is 60 to 250 mL. Death depends on the size of the individual, their general health and stomach contents. The exposure limit is 200ppm. The highly lethal nature of methanol (compared to ethanol) has not been fully researched, but it is believed to be the result of the byproducts of metabolism, which turn methanol into formic acid and formaldehyde, and formaldehyde has been proven to have selective injurious effects on retal cells- this is the reason for it's ability to cause blindness.

Methanol is metabolized and excreted at a rate about one-fifth that of ethanol, and a single dose may take up to 4 days to leave the body (provided the drinker isn't already dead)

Symptoms fom acute poisoning of a moderate dose- Severe headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, and central nervous system depression. Vision may fail temporarily or permanently after 2-6 days. In higher doses the above occurs much faster and turn into rapid shallow breathing, blood pressure falling, dilation of pupils blurring of vision, cyanosis. More than 25% of those who reach this level, even in a hospital, still die.

Chronic poisoning tends to result in visual imparement as the first symptom. The only treatment from chronic poisoning is to halt all exposure.

Treating acute cases must be done within 2 hours of ingestion: give syrup of ipacac. Lavage thoroughly with 2-4L of tap water with sodium bicarbonate (20G/L) added. This is to treat acidosis of the blood)

Antidote: Give ethanol, 50%, 1.5ml per kilo of body weight, orally, diluted to no more than a 5% solution, followed by 0.5-1ml/kg every 2 hours orally for 4 days. ethanol interferes with the absorbtion of methanol by the body and allows it to be excreted with less damaging effects. Also give up to 4 litres of water daily to maintain adequate urine output. Control delirium by giving 10mg valium slowly by injection in order to prevent respiratory depression.

Prognosis:in acute methanol poisoning approx 50% do not recover. Visual imparement will show no improvement after 1 week.

Treatment is usually recommended at upwards of 30ml methanol consumed, or when symptoms appear (sometimes this can be around the 3-4ml mark). That’s quite a bit. Personally I’d worry a lot more about paint off-gassing, household cleaners, and fungus spores in your home than I would about methanol. Just don’t drink the stuff.

Bradley, thanks for putting that into perspective. When I read that substance “X” is toxic, the literature doesn’t always give me a good sense of just how toxic. Sounds like skin absorption (if one uses reasonable care) just isn’t all that big of a danger.

Of course, blindness and death are pretty serious, so reasonable care definitely is called for.

David, thanks for your input as well.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

"how do you know what antifreeze tastes like?"

Bradley: Bill Clinton never inhaled. I never swallowed. But, yes, I've used taste to ID automotive leaks at times. 0.01 ml, maybe. Which I then spit out and spit and spit and spit.

I didn't know about Bolivia having an issue with that, although I can imagine it. There was some tainted wine (intentionally "fortified" with anti-freeze to up the alcohol content) out of Eastern Europe a few years back.

I'm theorizing now: Concurrent ethanol ingestion would be better then none. It would spread the dose of oxalic acid out over time.

As you might expect, anti-freeze is fairly poisonous to most mammals. The exception is the yellow-bellied marmot, especially the ones found in the Mineral King area of California. These marmots crawl up around parked cars and chew on the radiator hoses, thereby causing anti-freeze leaks. The green stuff dribbles out on the ground, and then the marmots lap it up. For some unexplained reason, it doesn't kill them. Drunken marmots are often seen staggering around Mineral King parking lots as if they had been on a week-long binge.

As quaint as that might appear, car owners are pretty ticked off when the green stain is underneath their car.

–B.G.–

"@Dave – Aren't they using Fomepizole to treat methanol poisoning now?"

Larry: Yes, that is increasingly the approach in hospital settings. But it's a few thousand $US for the drug alone*. At least you don't have to track BAL so closely as with ethanol treatment. I skipped that detail because it didn't an option in a first aid scenerio.

*And I wonder if the shift towards Fomepizole is in part because any drug that expensive has drug company reps pushing its use and advantages to clinicians. Pfizer has a MUCH higher mark-up than Seagrams. Here's a reason to keep 3 grams in stock and I'm sure they give it a finite shelf life.

And while it is subjective, I think keeping someone a little drunk is a reasonable target in a field setting.

Other uses of alcohol ARE old wives' tales (maybe more likely "old husbands' tales"?) – booze for frostbite, snakebite, etc. And in most of those applications, it actually makes things worse.

Martin: Thanks for the greater medical details in your post.

Kudos to Bob. He's taken a discussion of stove fuel all the way to drunken rodents. (But several of us get credit for thread-jacking assists.)

Arctic Ground Squirrels can live down to −2.9 °C (26.8 °F) but I think that is because of a lack of nucleation sites for ice crystal formation rather than older assumptions about anti-freeze in their blood. But maybe the marmots are cleverly preparing for winter by freeze-proofing themselves.

Re Mineral King: are people still running chicken wire around their parked cars to discourage the nibble on rubber / plastic under the hood? That was the practice in the 1980's.

You know, since leaving California, no animals have eaten, nibbled on, or died in a vehicle of mine. That used to happen all the time. The babysitter did take out a moose at 60 mph once. I consoled her that she'd fed four poor families that night.

"Re Mineral King: are people still running chicken wire around their parked cars to discourage the nibble on rubber / plastic under the hood?"

Yes. The store up there rents out a piece of chicken wire for visitors to use. Oddly enough, the rental price turns out to be about the same as what it would have cost to purchase the chicken wire at a store back home.

I think it would be great if humans could get their organs tuned up for toxic chemicals the same way that marmots apparently have.

–B.G.–

"And I wonder if the shift towards Fomepizole is in part because any drug that expensive has drug company reps pushing its use and advantages to clinicians. Pfizer has a MUCH higher mark-up than Seagrams."

Quite probably. Sometimes it seems like there are just as many lobbyists in hospitals as there are in congress!

"And while it is subjective, I think keeping someone a little drunk is a reasonable target in a field setting."

Yes, this is reasonable for first aid. Something I can add to my first aid knowledge, which is always a good thing. Thanks.

Here’s a shot of the Mineral King parking lot a couple of years ago (2009).

Note all the tarps and such on cars to try to ward off the marmots. I used chicken wire on my car. No mishaps.

Some cars left their hoods open. I guess they thought the marmots wouldn’t like it if it were well lit?

One of the miscreants.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

Imagine if marmots ever became the new, trendy pet like chinchillas, llamas, ferrets and ostriches each once were.

"Oh, look the Joneses down the block are having 40 tons of granite boulders delivered to their front yard. They must be getting a marmot!"

Oh, I see a way out of this. Chinchillias to fur coats to PETA to vegans to soy products to biodiesel and we'll finally get this post back to fuels again!

HJ will have to show one of his alcohol stoves that is sized just right for a marmot roast.

–B.G.–

Biodiesel? Hmm. Now what kind of efficiency can I get out of that? ;)

HJ
Adventures in Stoving

HJ will have to show one of his alcohol stoves that is sized just right for a marmot roast.

–B.G.–

Funny you should mention that.

HJ
Adventures in Stoving