Determination of the Rate of Disappearance

Prior to World War II, the time of persistence of mustard gas (bis ,-chloroethyl) sulfide (hereafter referred to as H), in tissues had not adequately been determined. Although it was known that in aqueous environments H is rapidly hydrolysed to innocuous products, it seemed possible that this substance, because of its high lipoid solubility, might persist for much longer periods in the lipoid fractions of tissues. This possibility required investigation because of its bearing upon the potential efficacy of methods of decontamination, or treatment based upon the introduction into tissues of substances capable of reacting with and detoxifying H. The results of numerous investigations carried out during the war years have established that H, as such, rapidly disappears from the skin and eye. The present paper, based on work carried out in 1942, presents the results of one of the quantitative chemical investigations bearing on this point. Similar conclusions may be derived from the results of other work, notably that of Henriques, Mortiz, Breyfogle and Patterson (1941 to 1944) (1) on the skin, and that of Snell ( 1942, 1943) (2) on the cornea. It is the purpose of this paper to report the results of an investigation designed to measure the rate of disappearance of H in tissue (cornea), and to correlate the quantity of H reacting with the degree of one of the effects produced by H on corneal tissue, viz., inhibition of turgescence which results normally when corneas are immersed in water. The latter effect was chosen for quantitating the effect, since previous studies by Cogan-and the authors had shown that exposure to H gave rise to reproducible changes in the degree of swelling.