The Second Indochina War (or Vietnam Conflict) of 1961-1975 is noted for the widespread and severe environmental damage inflicted upon its theatre of operations, especially in the former South Vietnam (Westing, 1976, 1980, 1982a, 1984b). The US strategy in South Vietnam, inter alia, involved massive rural area bombing, extensive chemical and mechanical forest destruction, large-scale chemical a...

M ore than 20 years ago, trichothecene mycotoxins made their controversial debut on the world stage. Alexander Haig, who was U.S. Secretary of State and visiting the western sector of then-divided Berlin, alleged in 1981 that trichothecenes had been used as biological warfare agents in Southeast Asia. He cited statements from villagers in the region, who claimed that they became ill after “yell...

We report here our preliminary results on the use of catalytic antibodies as an approach to neutralizing organophosphorus chemical weapons. A first-generation hapten, methyl-alpha-hydroxyphosphinate Ha, was designed to mimic the approach of an incoming water molecule for the hydrolysis of exceedingly toxic methylphosphonothioate VX (1a). A moderate protective activity was first observed on poly...

A little-known effort to conduct biological warfare occurred during the 17th century. The incident transpired during the Venetian–Ottoman War, when the city of Candia (now Heraklion, Greece) was under siege by the Ottomans (1648–1669). The data we describe, obtained from the Archives of the Venetian State, are related to an operation organized by the Venetian Intelligence Services, which aimed ...

Bioterrorism has received a lot of attention in the first decade of this century. Biological agents are considered attractive weapons for bioterrorism as these are easy to obtain, comparatively inexpensive to produce and exhibit widespread fear and panic than the actual potential of physical damage. Bacillus anthracis (B. anthracis), the etiologic agent of anthrax is a Gram positive, spore form...

objective: the aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between marital satisfaction with psychological health in women whose husbands had either suffered from psychiatric problems or been exposed to chemical warfare during iraq-iran imposed war. method: participants were selected from the war-affected women in mazandaran province in north of iran whose husbands had either suffe...

The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) was opened for signature on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975 with the United Kingdom, the United States and the former Soviet Union as the depositary governments. The Convention is to eliminate biological weapons and prohibit their development, production, stockpiling, acquisition and retention. It has 15 articles. The init...

Worldwide, there is an evident danger for the use of biological hazardous agents as weapons of mass destruction. The potential spectrum of bioterrorism ranges from hoaxes to classic biological warfare agents, which can produce mass casualties. Therefore, the reliable and fast identification of bacteria and spores as well as “white powders” is a challenging task. MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry fing...

Sulfur mustard (SM) and similar bifunctional agents have been used as chemical weapons for almost 100 years. Victims of high-dose exposure, both combatants and civilians, may die within hours or weeks, but low-dose exposure causes both acute injury to the eyes, skin, respiratory tract and other parts of the body, and chronic sequelae in these organs are often debilitating and have a serious imp...