Originally Posted by
Radgirl
Err......no. If 25% of your circulating blood is alcohol that is about ten times the amount needed to kill you. Usual rubbish reporting. Oh, sorry, it is the Daily M@@@. Must be true
It's a pretty humorous typo. 27 ml of alcohol per 100 ml of blood would be about 54 proof and would be instantly fatal.
In defense of the reporter or lawyers who mixed this up, the units for measuring blood alcohol content are a bit bizarre.
In the US, we take the number of grams of alcohol per 100 ml of blood and state it as a percentage even though neither alcohol nor blood weigh 1 gram per milliliter, so the percentages have real units associated with them, not the sort of unit-free numbers/ratios that percentages are generally used for. If your BAC is 0.02%, that does not mean that 0.02% of the weight of your blood is alcohol or that the volume that the alcohol in your blood would take up if it were somehow removed from your blood is 0.02% of the volume of you blood. It is a weight to volume ratio stated as a percentage, presumably for historical reasons. 0.02% actually means that you have 0.02 grams of alcohol per hundred ml (one deciliter) of blood or .0002 g per ml, which is mathematically the same as 0.02% g/ml, but nobody uses percentages that way. In more standard units, it would just be called 0.2 grams/liter, or for chemists, some number of mmol/l.
In the UK, apparently they refer to the number of milligrams per 100 ml, so our 0.02% (0.02 g/100 ml) becomes 20 mg per 100 ml. All the lawyer or reporter had to do was confuse the "mg" with "ml" and our guy suddenly has about 1000x as much alcohol in his blood.
And, I agree with those who said that it would be odd for someone to be unsteady on their feet due to 0.027% BAC. People are allowed to drive in most states with levels about three times that. I suspect the security guard smelled alcohol and convinced himself the guy was unsteady on his feet as a result of the alcohol he smelled.