The dose makes the poison even with non-toxic paints!

A secretary who ran the office for one of our larger industrial clients stopped us one day as we left the plant with a set of samples. Her niece's baby was in the hospital with the symptoms of metal poisoning. The family doctor and specialists had quizzed the parents and no one had been able to identify a source of heavy metal that the child might have ingested. The teething infant had been chewing on his crib but the bed had been painted with non-toxic paint to avoid just such an event. The hospital labs had run quantitative tests for all the normal heavy metals without finding the offending element. We were able to get a sample of the paint off the crib and had a qualitative emission spectrograph run on the scrapings. The paint was found to have a white pigment with a barium/calcium sulphate base. In excess virtually all metals are poisonous. Although the "non-toxic" paint was formulated with alkali metal pigments rather than the older lead based materials the small body weight of the infant did not have enough mass to absorb the ingested dose of poisons. As far back as the middle ages the alchemists had written, "the dose makes the poison" and had realized that the concentration in our bodies is the real culprit in all poisonings.

We were told later that treatment was effective and the toddler was returned to good health.