Thank you for pointing that out, and I'm not being sarcastic. They're entirely different chemicals.
Remember "Eleven Blue Men" by Berton Roueche? It was a case history of a group of accidental sodium nitrite poisonings that happened in New York in 1944. The piece was collected in The Medical Detectives, and the TV show "House" used quite a few cases from that book in its first two seasons.
Indeed. One of the classic traps in sophomore organic courses is the nitration of benzene to nitro benzene that requires NO2+ (made from nitric acid and sulfuric acid). Students will often reach for NaNO2 since the NO2 is “right there” not realizing that nitrite is NO2-. The electrons make all the difference.