Chemical Forums
Specialty Chemistry Forums => Other Sciences Question Forum => Topic started by: Limpet Chicken on July 19, 2004, 09:24:30 PM
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Hey again people! Could anyone help me with this?
Would conventional nerve agent treatments, valium, praludoxime, and atropine protect against this agent? the structure is
O-Ethyl S-(2-dimethylaminoethyl) methylphosphonothioate, and it has a slightly lower toxicity than VX agent but a greater risk due to a higher volatility.
Also, could some kind soul point me towards some information/patents concerning the russian novichok agents? I have looked and I can't find much detail on their chemistry at all :( (cough..bloody secretive russians...)
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Woohoo my 50th post ;D
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O-Ethyl S-(2-dimethylaminoethyl) methylphosphonothioate looks like a derivative of VX. Nerve agents kills by overstimulating neuron to produce muscle convulsion all over the body. Any drug that competes with Nerve Agent to bind to the neurons should be able to stop it from killing people. Just that it's harder to decontaminate and more likely to stay put on a surface. It can reach to more people consequently.
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I was mainly wondering if there would be any nasty surprises with it, like with soman, because after soman binds to acetylcholinesterase, it can be reversed if treated immediately, but after a short while, it irreversibly damages the enzyme making soman exposure hard to treat, I was just wondering if this agent (I don't think it's in military use at all that I know of) would have any nasty effects like that.
I don't think so though, wouldn't the pinacolyl groups in soman derivatives be responsible for the unique sticking power of the agents to acetylcholinesterase?
Oddly enough I think I recall reading about pinacolyl alcohol being used on farms as some sort of a parasiticide, you would have thought a precursor like that would be more tighly regulated wouldn't you?
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might as well mention phosgene during the pre-regulated days when it was commonly used as an herbicide.. you never know one day someone developed a chemcial weapon derived from DDT.
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Is that a challenge there geo? lol j/k, why bother with something as highly regulated/forbidden as DDT when all the nasty phosgene one could ever dream of could be had from UV treatment of chloroform?
Do you mean that phosgene was used as a herbicide in times past? I always thought it was more of an everything-icide if it got loose ;D
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agent orange had a similar history too.
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Whether DDT caused the serious health effects people claim is still upto debate. The fact that it hardly gets broken down and ends up in the tissue of higher animals is scarry though.
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DDT is essentially non-toxic to humans. My undergrad advisor knows some guy who eats DDT every so often. I'm not sure why the guy does it, I guess just to prove a point.
I've heard that DDT was actually investigated as a treatment for cancer.
I think the real problem with DDT was that it last virtually forever in the environment and it accumulates into things like the shells of bird eggs and causes them to weaken.
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Since DDT is so chemically stable that it can accumulate in animal bodies, then how does it kill pests?
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I can't remember, but I think it was something to do with blocking nervous system transmissions, especially in mosquitos.
This website has some more information, but its mostly about toxicity to mammals:
http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicrotophos/ddt-ext.html
According to that sight DDT is "moderately to slightly toxic."
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DDT is also suspected of being possibly carcinogenic/mutagenic in humans,
(which I think is good, humanity is filth and in dire need of some serious cleansing of the gene pool, but that's just my thoughts...oh well...)
Anyone have access to any translations of russian reseach papers concerning novichok agents? supposed to be several orders of magnitude greater in toxicity than VX agent.
Scary stuff....
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DDT is also suspected of being possibly carcinogenic/mutagenic in humans,
There have been some studies on rats and mice though were DDT has been shown to inhibit carcinogensis by other things. For example, they exposed rats to methylcholanthrene, a potent carcinogen. All of the control rats got tumors, but only 8% of the rats that had DDT in their diet got tumors.
They also checked some employees of DDT plants who had high exposure over 10-20 years and there was no cancer in the 35 workers they checked. They had up to 400 times the average DDT levels in their body fat.
Pretty remarkable studies....
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Also, something can be considered a carcinogen when it really, in fact, is not. Look at aspartame. For the longest time they said that continued use of it will cause cancer. Yet, I've been a diabetic for 22 years now and have lived off of artificial sweetners and I have no signs of cancer. The whole fiasco over aspartame was recently withdrawn when the researchers realized that they were just giving WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much to the lab rats in comparison to what a normal human being would consume. If you were to feed me nearly 3/4 my body weight in aspartame, you're damn right I'll get sick. lol.
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Was aspartame implicated as a carcinogen too? I knew that saccharin had been, but I had never heard that about aspartame. I have heard that aspartame affects memory, but that might have just been a rumor.