Potassium permanganate (KMnO4) used to be bought at a chemist’s shop as purple crystals. Way back, when Adam was a boy, it was included in snake bite kits – along with a razor blade to slash the wound.
As a budding chemist, I used to spend my pocket money on ingredients to make fireworks and rockets (imagine trying to do that now) and soon discovered an interesting property of potassium permanganate (oxidiser) – when mixed with glycerine (fuel) it would fizzle and eventually the mix would burst into flames.
Our local swimming pool at times had a foot wash with a potassium permanganate solution in it to disinfect swimmers feet. I don’t think it did much harm, but it would not be considered acceptable practice today.
Many years later I was involved with determining a claim of manganese poisoning of some of the local people on Groote Eylandt. There was a huge manganese mine on the island. We were shown a film of a sad case of a local aborigine with the classic hen walking gait attributed to manganese poisoning. However, dust from the mine was not an issue as the mine haul roads (the main potential source of environmental dust) were well constructed and maintained. We did look at the some of the potential sources of manganese in their diet including well brewed Billy Tea. Again, not much there, but I did find that in the days of locked tea caddies and tea clippers, tea leaves used to get recycled by some – using potassium permanganate to dye the tea leaves.
And the manganese poisoning – I suspect that it was due to poorly prepared local nuts, that have to be pulverised and well washed before eating. Resides from the nuts contain a powerful neurotoxin which has a latency of several decades. Similar problems have been reported on Guam.
