And, as I said, physicist, not a toxicologist/chemist/etc, so I was pretty sure my numbers would be bad – if you wanted me to compute the required amount of chili he’d have needed to eat in order to reach escape velocity, I could do that, although the work has been done already (http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:jLdQOq_M2O8J:www.shaastra.org/downloads/FART.PDF+thrust+generated+by+flatulence&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a) – the point I was trying to make was that it’d be crazy hard to die from too much flava without some preexisting condition.

Michaelrn is also quite right about getting to the ER. I don’t travel now without an EpiPen.

My money’s on an anaphylactic reaction, aka Type I allergic reaction. The time of onset is consistent with Type I, and a Type I reaction can be fatal. If I had seen it I would have called 911 (or whatever number they dial in the UK to access emergency services) or transported him to the nearest ER.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2194/is_/ai_20445890

That sounds like an excellent multiplayer game as well…

(is there any other kind than nasty? hmmm,….)

http://www.gicare.com/pated/ecdgs38.htm

Care for some chili? I’ve added an extra ingredient just for you. The merciless peppers of Quetzlzacatenango! Grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum.

I’m gonna cry foul on #4 – from TFA:

—-

The studies revealed no specific evidence that OC caused or contributed significantly to any of these deaths. However, the subjects who died, all of whom were male, possessed some or all of the following features:

* Obesity

* Large stature

* Bizarre behavior due to psychotic delusional, agitated, or stimulant-drug induced mental states

* Occult (hidden) heart disease

* Failure to be subdued by OC spray

* Involvement in a struggle or other violent or high-exertion activity.

Many of the subjects were restrained in positions of possible respiratory compromise, such as prone, hog-tied, or tightly strapped. Often, they died quietly during transport to jail or to the hospital.

—-

It seems to me that it wasn’t the pepper spray itself which did this, but rather the combination of weight, respiratory problems and possible drug use.

Also, we need to keep in mind that -pepper spray- is brought into the lungs in an aerosolized format, which CAN cause irritation and impede respiration. Unless he was snorting lines of Cayenne WHILE eating, this is not what happened.

Also, the LD50 (Oral/Mouse) for Capsaicin, the chemical found in Capiscum, is 47.2mg/kg. If we assume this guy was of more or less normal build, 180 pounds is about 80 kilos. So 3.776 grams of Capsaicin would have a 50% chance of killing him. However! The average Capsaicin content of Capiscum is approximately 0.25% of total weight, and that’s for a capiscum extract (http://www.extension.iastate.edu/nutrition/supplements/capiscum.php). So, unless my math is wrong, he’d have needed to ingest about 15 kilograms of pure capiscum extract in order to have a 50% chance of dying.

Of course, I’m a Physicist, not a Chemist, so my understandings of LD50 may be off.

It’ll be interesting to see what the final coroner’s report says.

The LD50 is the oral dose at which 50% of subjects died, not the dose at which individuals have a 50% chance of dying. LD50s are derived by testing at multiple dose levels and plotting the % of animals that die after a fixed amount of contiuous exposure time (24h, 48h, 7 days etc).

They need to be taken with some salt:
1- because even closely-related animals can differ in their susceptibility by factors of 10-1000x, so extrapolating to people is a stretch (which is why regulatory agencies apply an additional safety factor when setting human Tolerable Daily Intake regulations).

2- your LD50 seems low? From Johnson (2007) in International Journal of Toxicology:
“Oral LD50 values as low as 161.2 mg/kg (rats) and 118.8 mg/kg (mice) have been reported for Capsaicin in acute oral toxicity studies, with hemorrhage of the gastric fundus observed in some of the animals that died. Intravenous, intraperitoneal, and subcutaneous LD50 values were lower.”

3- This was clearly an acute situation. So you’re right, the guy would’ve had to eat a supernova’s worth of Scofield units to get enough capsaicin… but if he had a pre-existing irritation of the bowels, who knows if that last big dose was enough to puncture his digestive tract. I still like the allergy hypothesis, because of the itching. ;)

I like fairly spicey food. For instance, I can eat the hottest wings that any chain (like Buffalo Wild Wings) can offer without any problem. I can put wasabi onto sushi and grin ear to ear. I don’t like extremely hot food, but I can stand spicier food than just about anyone I know. (But then, most people I know don’t like food that is at all spicey.)

I once tried a drop–one single drop–of a salsa made from habaneros that were boiled down, and then boiled down again, and then boiled down again, until they were about as concentrated as possible. There was a little bowl to sample in a store, and there was a sign saying, essentially, “This stuff is REALLY hot, and we’re not kidding–HOT–so be very careful.”

One drop. I thought I was going to pass out. My entire head felt like it was in flames. For a period of fifteen or twenty minutes I fought back a rising sense of panic. My face flushed beet red and I started sweating like a freight train. Finally, gradually, the burning went away, and after another half an hour I was back to normal.

If I’d really loaded up a chip with a bunch of the stuff, I think I would have ended up in a hospital.

Any boastful pretension I might have once had of how I could handle hot food ended that day. When a sign says, “This stuff is REALLY HOT” I beat a hasty retreat.

um, what?

I think you mean Scoville, not ‘Scofield’.

The LD50 is the oral dose at which 50% of subjects died, not the dose at which individuals have a 50% chance of dying

These two things are effectively the same- if an individual is picked at random from a population similar to that tested for LD50, and given a dose identical to the LD50, there is indeed a 50% chance that it will be lethal.

But yes, LD50 is an extremely blunt instrument.