Portal:Ecotox/Intro

Everyting is toxic...

The founder of toxicology, Paracelsus (1493 - 1541) is most famous for his quote “All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”. With this he indicated that in sufficiently large doses all substances can be toxic. So can even water be lethal if it’s drunk in too large amounts. Salt can be poisonous as well if one eats mutable table spoons of it at once. These examples show that toxicity is relative, it doesn’t only depend on the harmful characteristics of a substance, but also on the level at which an organism was exposed to it.

At present there are about 100,000 chemicals known that might cause harm to humans or the environment.