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Comment by termain | Hacker News Reader

Edit: Ok, ok, I totally screwed that up. Damnit. Sorry, everyone. Grams aren't kilograms. The freaking base unit shouldn't have a prefix.

2000mg/kg = 2, right?

Like 2kg of medicine for every one kg of body mass? That seems impossible to consume. Even 0.1 kg/kg seems really, really high.

Or is mg here used for micrograms rather than milligrams? So it's actually 2000 μg/kg.

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2000 mg is 2g (a kg is 1000g, or 1 x 10^6mg)

Have you worked on software for NASA Mars probes in the past?

Err.... NASA software, yes. No Mars probes yet.

Yeah, I know, I know.

I really need to be less sarcastic.

I concur entirely. You had ought to be ashamed of yourself.

It was the perfect comment.

2g of drug per kilogram of body mass. That's not the therapeutic dose, that's the safety limit.

2000mg = 2 grams not 2 kilograms. So it would be 2 grams per kilogram.

2kg = 20000000mg.

Hope that clears that up.

Wrong. 2000mg/Kg = 2g/Kg, two grams of the chemical per kilogram (1000g) of the subject. To give you an idea, that's 160g of chemical for an 80Kg human. Quite a lot, but nowhere near impossible to consume...

Actually it's just something between 0.8g and 8g, 160g is a safe limit, not the therapeutic dose.

> 2000mg/kg = 2, right?

No, 2000mg/kg = 0.002

> Like 2kg of medicine for every one kg of body mass?

No, 2g for every kg of body. And that's some safe limit, not therapeutic dose.

> Or is mg here used for micrograms rather than milligrams?

No, it's milligrams.

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