Talk:Toxicant

WikiProject importance

1. toxicants are *just* effective compounds? i thought they were detrimental compounds. the opening statement is misleading, if so. 2. this is NOT a low importance article, & here is why: with the hyper medication of our current culture, toxic effects of man made toxic compounds (toxic effects) such as the negative (/side) effects of medication, as well as other (all?) synthetic compounds, is AN IMPORTANT COUNTERPOINT. it is not good - & in fact suspicious - to rate this article low in importance, given the amount of synthesis around us. i say medium. -- lakitu (talk) 20:41, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Removed text

Removed Toxicants are typically introduced into the environment by human activity. Not sure what that's supposed to mean... its position in the lead tends to suggest it's part of the definition of toxicant, which isn't true. Or it could mean that human activity typically produces toxicants, which isn't true either except in a vague and truistic sense.

The lead needs more work and a better citation. Currently there's no mention of the effect being negative, and the ref is to an article on money not chemicals. Hope this might be a start. Andrewa (talk) 22:38, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Edits

Removed references to a journalism site for a biological topic. Furthermore the reference was comparing "toxin" to "toxic", neither of which is the topic of this page. While it may be appropriate to reference something like that for a page on "toxic", it is not for "toxicant". Replaced with references to the national cancer institute dictionary. Also, referecnes to dynamic energy budget theory are not core to this concept --> removed. Section on levels of toxicants did not add anything concrete, nor is the idea that low levels have different effects from high levels of a substance specific to a toxicant -- at least not a whole section for this. Would be more appropriate in a section on "toxic threshhold", or something like that. Perhaps someone could add something back that is brief about toxicants having more or less effect at different levels. Nanomed Dreams (talk) 04:12, 21 February 2012 (UTC)

how do toxins harm our environment??????????? 117.205.117.28 (talk) 18:51, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Disputed claim concerning definition

Hello. I'm hear because I was trying to determine if Category:Toxins should be a subcategory of Category:Toxicants. As I noted in the Talk page for Category:Toxins, I don't dispute it but question whether it's accurate or not. Then I noticed the citation for the following claim on this article doesn't support the claim: "The term covers substances that may be man-made, biologically produced, or naturally occurring." The citation used makes no mention of the word "toxicant," and in fact a search of the book doesn't turn up the word "toxicant" at all. The cited source only says "Whether a chemical is synthetic or 'natural' has no bearing on its toxicity." We understand that a natural and man-made chemical has the potential to be toxic, but that statement doesn't support the idea that a toxicant can be natural or man-made.

So, the first problem seems to be the source doesn't back up the claim. The second issue I've found is a discrepancy in the literature on what constitutes a toxicant and what constitutes a toxin. Two sources from Godard and Johnson (2001) and from Liboiron (2017) argue that the two terms are different: that toxicants are man-made and toxins are naturally occurring. However, I found a source citing a Cope et al. 2004 declaring a toxicant can be made-man or natural, and that all toxins are toxicants. This seems to be the source. Regardless, I'm finding differing points of view. It would be nice to have a subject matter expert or two weigh in. At a minimum, if Cope et al. are indeed correct, and Godard and Johnson, and Liboiron, are misinterpreting the view, we need to update the article to reflect that. But I am hesitant to make that change without further review from subject matter experts. Lostraven (talk) 19:40, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

The citation used does mention the word "toxicant. Read the 4th paragraph on page 39.

It does support the claim for natural or man-made using another source.

A toxicant and a toxin are different. If you can find another quote to make that more clear please add it to the article. I have seen sources make mistakes using the word toxin when they should be using the word toxicant. The best thing to do is find more sources so that the article will not be confusing. QuackGuru (talk) 23:43, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Dubious

I am dubious that the term toxin applies only to toxicants produced naturally by an organism. This excludes mineral toxins in food like arsenic and cadmium. Arsenic is a toxin according to many reliable sources: WebMD[1], Consumer Reports[2], PNAS[3], ScienceDaily[4], Discover Magazine[5], and Eos (magazine)[6]. -- Paleorthid (talk) 23:29, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Consulting major dictionaries, toxin is commonly applied specifically to poisonous substances of biological origin, so this distinction is commonly made, but toxin is sometimes used more generally. SciberDoc (talk) 15:51, 24 March 2024 (UTC)