Modeling of Toxicological Effects of Fire Gases: I. Incapacitating Effects of Narcotic Fire Gases

Abstract

Common fire gas toxicants fall into two major classes, narcosis-producing agents and irritants. It is desirable to model, mathematically, the effects of these common toxicants on humans exposed in a fire, and therefore, obviate the use of large numbers of laboratory animals in smoke toxicity testing. From a review of methodologies for assessment of the incapacitating effects of the nar cotic fire gases, it appears that rats are sensitive to approximately the same range of accumulated doses as may be deemed potentially hazardous to human subjects. This paper introduces an approach as a first approximation to the modeling of the incapacitating effects of the narcotic toxicants based on correla tion of observed effects with accumulated doses to which subjects are exposed.