How accurate are breathalysers compared to blood tests?

When assessing whether someone is over the limit for alcohol consumption, it is based on a threshold of blood alcohol concentration. So, this is set to 0.08% blood alcohol concentration. 

With a breathalyser, it is not measuring the blood alcohol level in your blood. It's measuring the amount of alcohol, or ethanol, in your breath. Therefore, a breathalyser test can only give you an indication of whether you are over the limit. If you have, it's very efficient at measuring ethanol within your breath, but that's not to say it's not as accurate as a blood test. 

A blood test will always give you a more definitive answer to whether you are above that threshold of 0.08% blood alcohol concentration.

Are there toxic ingredients in home cleaning products?

Absolutely, there are.

A lot of these cleaning products are very good because they have a very high pH, so they're quite alkaline. This allows for efficient cleaning, it's able to kill harmful bacteria. It's able to work with water to efficiently scrub out grime, dirt, and so on. 

However, these chemicals with such high pH - they can also cause quite a lot of harm, especially if they're ingested.  Even on skin, you can have skin absorption of alkaline substances such as bleach, and that could cause irritation, redness, rash - and you must wash immediately. 

Usually, they do not even recommend using any soap because that could even interact with the potential, maybe if you have bleach in your hand, it's just water - you want to remove it from the site as soon as possible. 

So, this is why you have a lot of those hazard labels on cleaning products telling you whether it's corrosive, or whether it is an alkaline and so on, and telling you especially - do not drink.

How does alcohol become toxic in the body?

When you consume alcohol, it is absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract through the bloodstream, that gets completely directed to the liver. This is known as first pass metabolism. Now in the liver, alcohol is broken down, and this is done by enzymes - aldehyde dehydrogenase, and alcohol dehydrogenase. 

So, these are two enzymes that break down alcohol. However, there's only a limited capacity that these enzymes actually have. So, what happens is - if you drink too much alcohol, these enzymes get overloaded, and cannot function to break down alcohol and remove it from your body. So, there's a buildup of alcohol in your system, and this is why usually alcoholics or people who binge drink, their livers can be quite damaged from this. There's an overload of alcohol, the enzymes cannot manage all the alcohol that is being delivered to the liver, which leads to potential cells dying at the liver and onset of disease, and symptoms. 

But the liver is very good at managing with a limited capacity. So, even if I think it's about 30% of the liver's functioning, you might not see any symptoms yet. But, once you cross over that threshold - it might be too late. So, this is why it's really important to make sure that you're not exceeding your limits when taking alcohol.