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| Pemalite said: However, I guess it does allow SAPOL to pick those up with a noisy muffler easier... A noisy muffler is a good sign that the muffler is degrading and thus may have a carbon monoxide leak, which can leak into the cabin which displaces the oxygen causing asphyxiation... But that is the firefighter coming out in me. |
Apologies for how pedantic this point is going to be, but my "ears" perked up when I read this as a biochemist. What you stated was true for carbon dioxide (the stuff you breath out) as the only danger from that is that oxygen gets displaced, but carbon monoxide is actually more deadly than that. It's thought to be related to CO binding heme rather tightly. Originally this was assumed to be because CO replaced O2 in one's blood, but some studies on dogs (obviously before this was deemed no cool) showed that you could replace a dog's blood with 80% CO bound blood and they could survive, but if their blood become 20-30% CO bound from CO they are breathing they'll die. Now it's hypothesized that CO binds other important heme proteins like cytochromes and myoglobin.
Here's a study that references the dog study if anyone is curious (it's surprisingly difficult to get the dog study itself as its from a smaller journal and published in 1975: https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-018-1385-4
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