How Does Potassium Cyanide Affect The Body

Do you know what Potassium cyanide is, what it does to your body, and what its use is? This paper will answer all those questions, and will specifically examine how potassium cyanide affects the body and how it is used. Potassium cyanide is a white crystalline salt solid that has a faint, bitter-almond like smell. It’s empirical formula is KCN. The taste of KCN is described as burning the tongue and tasting acrid. This compound deliquescent,which means that it tends to dissolve. The appearance is similar to sugar, and is highly soluble in water.

Potassium cyanide was produced by a British chemist in the 1800s. Potassium cyanide was the was the most important alkali metal cyanides before the Castner process. The Castner process is is a process
This compound is highly toxic and it affects the whole body, especially the brain, heart, blood vessels, and the lungs. Potassium cyanide is a potent inhibitor of cellular respiration, which prevents the body from oxidizing food to produce useful energy. The tissues are not able to use the oxygen in the blood, which creates Cerebral hypoxia. Cerebral hypoxia is when the brain is completely deprived of oxygen. If this continues, the skin may also appear bluish, the heart rate may increase, nosebleed, headache, the blood cells’ numbers may change, and much more. They might faint, lose consciousness for a long time, coma, seizures, and eventually, they could die from brain
All kinds of cyanide, not only KCN, is used to separate the gold from it’s ore. The ore is reduced to particles using a grinding machine. Water is added to make a fine particles or a mush of the ore. Then the particles or mush is combined with potassium cyanide or other kind of cyanide. To prevent the toxic hydrogen cyanide during the process, calcium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide is often added to maintain the solution to strongly basic. The method of using cyanide instead liquid mercury was developed at Scotland in 1887. The process was first used on the Rand in 1890 and, It tons of investment for larger gold mines were opened. The first to used this method in large scale commercial mining was by the New Zealand Crown Mines Company at Karangahake in 1889. The use of cyanide is considered to be a much safer than using liquid mercury. Cyanide filtering has been the main method to extract gold since the 1970s. In Canada, more than 90% uses cyanide to extract