Please direct correspondence to Pierre Gareil at [email protected]. he different conflicts of the 20th century were marked by the use of chemical weapons. Therefore, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was signed in 1993 and came into force in 1997 to prohibit the development, production, stockpiling, and use of chemical warfare agents (1). But today, the use of chemical weapons by terro...

Self-poisoning with organophosphorus (OPs) pesticide is a serious clinical problem across Asian countries. The aim of the present study was to assess the value of the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), serum acetylcholinesterase (SChE) and leukocyte on the length of stay and mortality due to OP poisoning as a prognostic value. We studied acutely OP-poisoned patients who had been admitted to the toxicolo...

On September 22, 1980 Iraqis attacked Iran's air bases and simultaneously entered Iran with six army divisions on three fronts and occupied a vast part of Iranian territories. At that time, Iraqis did not have chemical warfare. But in time, they began to develop an intensive research program to produce and store chemical weapons and used the war fields to test and perfect their chemical warfare...

The differentiation of paraoxonase (an A-type esterase in serum) from related enzymes has been complicated by overlapping substrate specificities and by the complex nature of these enzymes. Rabbit-serum paraoxonase has been differentiated from hog-kidney diisopropyl phosphorofluoridatase by Mounter (1954). He confirmed the observation of Aldridge (1953b) that one enzyme in rabbit serum hydrolys...

The large-scale use of chemical warfare agents first occurred during World War I (the "chemists' war"), and was thereafter repeated at irregular intervals, most recently during the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. There was consequently a possibility that chemical weapons might be used in the Gulf war. The threat posed by terrorist groups became evident in 1994-95, when Japanese civilians were ...

Nerve agents are among the most dangereous chemical warfare agents (3, 29, 40, 45). They can be (and have been) misused by terrorists (4, 31). Moreover, the whole spectrum of these agents of the same basic chemical structure covers organophosphorus insecticides (OP) – chemicals easily available, frequently used over the world and causing professional, suicidal or accidental intoxications (4). A...

One hundred years ago, Warren established for the first time a quantitative link between dose and time while studying the toxicity of sodium chloride in Daphnia magna (Straus). During this century, many toxicologists in different contexts returned to this idea, which has become known as Haber’s Rule of inhalation toxicology. Most attempts to explore this relationship ended in frustration becaus...

Recently, a new chapter was started in the handbook of terror involving the application of nerve gas technology to the killing of civilians. On March 19, a terrorist attack in a Tokyo subway resulted in the loss of 10 lives and injury to over 5,000 others. In view of the lethality of the suspected agent, sarin, the fatalities were surprisingly few. Terrorist attacks on civilians are not new, bu...

This paper proposes that complex projectile weaponry was a key strategic innovation driving Late Pleistocene human dispersal into western Eurasia after 50 Ka. It argues that complex projectile weapons of the kind used by ethnographic hunter-gatherers, such as the bow and arrow, and spearthrower and dart, enabled Homo sapiens to overcome obstacles that constrained previous human dispersal from A...

Organophosphorus (OP) nerve agents are potent inhibitors of human acetylcholinesterase and butyrylcholinesterase. Although some OPs may induce delayed toxic effects on muscle and nerve,1 it is the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase that accounts for the acute life-threatening toxicity of soman, sarin, VX, tabun and similar OP compounds. This acute toxicity, which arises from the uncontrolled ac...