Tag Archives: Toxins

Chemical weapons agency agrees to ban Novichok nerve agents

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The OPCW global chemical weapons watchdog will add Novichok, the Soviet-era nerve agent used in an attack last year in Salisbury, England, to its list of banned toxins after its members adopted a proposal on Monday.

The 41 members of the decision-making body within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adopted a joint proposal by the United States, the Netherlands and Canada, member states said.

They agreed “to add two families of highly toxic chemicals (incl. the agent used in Salisbury),” Canada’s ambassador to the agency, Sabine Nolke, said on Twitter.

“Russia dissociated itself from consensus but did not break,” she wrote.

Western allies ordered the biggest expulsion of Russian diplomats since the height of the Cold War in response to the attack on former Russian secret service agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March.

Britain says Russian GRU military intelligence agents poisoned the Skripals with Novichok. Moscow denies involvement.

Monday’s OPCW decision was confidential and no other details were released.

It was the first such change to the organization’s so-called scheduled chemicals list, which includes deadly toxins VX, sarin and mustard gas, since it was established under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

The OPCW’s 193 member countries have 90 days to lodge any objections to Monday’s decision.

The OPCW, once a technical organization operating by consensus, broke along political lines over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which Russia supports militarily.

(Reporting by Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Lyme Disease “A Real Public Health Threat”

Doctors are sounding the alarm about Lyme Disease and the fact it’s beginning to spread nationwide.

“This is a real public health threat,” said Lyme Disease expert Dr. Richard Horowitz.  “We have to realize that this has spread.  It’s imitating all of these different diseases.  And people really need to understand the signs and symptoms and the unreliability of the blood test.”

Dr. Horowitz is trying to raise awareness of Lyme’s ability to mimic other diseases and because of the blood test’s tendencies to return false negatives, the importance of doctors and nurses looking at the symptoms to consider if Lyme is possible despite the test.

He gave the example of a Philadelphia area man named John who was a healthy landscape worker just four years ago.  He began to experience muscle twitching and eventually was unable to walk or feed himself.  It was only after he developed co-infections to Lyme disease such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever that doctors were able to confirm Lyme.

By then, it was too late for him to be treated by antibiotics and chronic Lyme had set in.  Now, John has to take about 60 pills a day for his condition.

Dr. Horowitz believes that the potential cause of long term Lyme is that the body’s ability to filter toxins is damaged.  Currently he is running studies to see if filtering toxins from the blood can help long term Lyme patients.

Environmental Toxins Increase Aging

A new study is showing that environmental toxins are leading to premature aging.

The study says a class of environmental toxins called gerontogens put humans at risk for accelerated again.  The toxins can be found in a wide range of items from second-hand cigarette smoke to UV rays and chemotherapy.

“Genetic studies have taught us only 30 percent of aging is genetic, meaning the other 70 percent comes from the environment,” Dr. Norman Sharpless told Fox News.  “Having a few [of these cells] is not a big deal.  But over the course of a lifetime, as they accumulate, they [contribute to] aging and many of the diseases we associate with aging.”

The study, published in Trends in Molecular Medicine, has allowed the doctors to create a test for substances to see their impact on aging.  The aging process begins when the body undergoes a process called senescence where healthy cells are damaged and are no longer able to divide.  The test will expose cells to substances until they cause the senescence process.

“Our work reasonably says cigarette smoking is the thing we could really do something about that would benefit the aging biology of a large number of people,” Dr. Sharpless said. “But we’re also reasonably certain there are other gerontogens we don’t know about yet.”