Structure-Toxicity Relationships for Industrial Chemicals Causing Type (II) Narcosis Syndrome

Several structure-activity relationships have been published for estimating the lethality of nonpolar nonelectrolytes to fish. The vast majority of non-reactive industrial chemicals produce toxicity symptoms consistent with narcosis. However, we have found that many chemicals which appear to produce narcosis, are substantially more toxic than the published structure-toxicity relationship predicts. We observed that these chemicals are more polar and often have acidic hydrogen bond donor functional groups. The data are consistent with the “polar” narcotic class proposed by Ferguson five decades ago.

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