Victims in San Pedro Had Dangerous Carbon Monoxide Levels Over 60 Percent

When it comes to carbon monoxide poisoning, the gas is considered to be at a dangerous level when exposure is at more than one hundred parts per million.  It is odorless and colorless and difficult to identify with the naked eye.  In the case of the triple deaths in San Pedro, Director Cho of the Forensics Services indicated that the three women carbon monoxide levels had surpassed sixty percent.

Gian Cho, Executive Director, NFSS: “What I can tell you is from the toxicology test that we did, which you don’t measure it as PPM, you measure it as  percent saturation of carbon monoxide.  A normal carbon monoxide test that is non-fatal for toxicology  you can have a normal result as high as about 3.5%,  which is not fatal and you won’t be sick. Smokers can have carbon monoxide levels or carboxyhemoglobin is the technical term,  saturation in their blood  up to about 8 % and they function normally if you smoke cigarettes on a regular basis. Anything above 10 % is where you start to experience adverse effects of carbon monoxide exposure, headaches, nausea, et cetera. 40 % is typically the threshold where it becomes fatal. The victims had, one of them was about, I don’t recall the exact numbers, but 60%. All of them had higher than 60 % carboxyhemoglobin saturation levels. One of them had as high as 80 % per saturation levels for carboxyhemoglobin, again is what we call it. So to extrapolate that to what the PPM would be in the room at the time, that’s some complicated analysis that we haven’t done or would not be able to do at this time. But we can tell you that from the toxicology results, the levels were well above that 40%, which is what is considered fatal. And I’m not talking about carbon monoxide in the room. I’m talking about carbon monoxide in the bodies of the victims.”

Director Cho further noted that while he could not speak on the speed of death when exposed to that level of carbon monoxide, he could definitively say that the danger of excessive carbon monoxide is that it begins to replace oxygen in the body.

Gian Cho, Executive Director, NFSS: “I can’t answer how fast you’d experience death at those levels, we’re talking about the blood is not being able to carry oxygen anymore to the brain, to the tissues that need it, because carbon monoxide has basically replaced oxygen on those hemoglobin  molecules. Not to get too much into the science of it but it’s basically carbon monoxide  binds much stronger to your blood cells than oxygen and so at those saturation levels, let’s say 50 % just for an easy ratio to look at, it means that over half or 50%, half of your blood cells that should be carrying oxygen are now filled instead with carbon monoxide. And so your bodies won’t be receiving oxygen, which it needs to function, to survive, for your brain to work. So you would experience those effects unconsciousness eventually. But in this case, the lungs would start filling up with fluid in a short space of time. But in terms of the exact duration that you would start to those symptoms, I can’t answer that.”

Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include headache, dizziness, and nausea.