Poison Eraser

Why Activated Charcoal Needs to be in Your Survival Pack.

- Martin Anders

It’s been a few days since you got separated from the rest of the group. To stretch out your supplies while you await rescue or find help, you’ve been living off the earth as much as possible. While your intentions may have been sound, your ability to spot edible plants wasn’t. Something you ate isn’t playing well with your internals. At best, you may be dealing with a major bout of gas. At worst, you might have inadvertently ingested some sort of poison.

If you’re forced to fend for yourself during a natural disaster, have found yourself in a postapocalyptic landscape, or are hopelessly lost in the woods, there’s a good chance that safe food and drinking water will be at a minimum. Nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pains can result from ingesting contaminated food and drink.

So what can you do when there’s no doctor in sight or a working hospital around? Enter activated charcoal.

The What

Activated charcoal — sometimes known as activated carbon or activated coal — is a type of charcoal that’s processed in a way to give its surface area large volumes of pores. It’s these tiny pores that allow it to efficiently adsorb toxins and chemicals, removing them from your body. Note this is adsorption, not absorption. What’s the difference? The latter involves a fluid being dissolved by another substance (think water being absorbed by a cracker), while the former involves molecules of a substance (say, a poison) adhering to the surface of another substance (in this case, activated charcoal).

This material is used in a span of fields — from engineering to agriculture. In fact, it’s the stuff that’s oftentimes used in air and water filters (see “H2O Hygiene” on page 80) to keep the essentials of life clean enough for our consumption.