This isn’t about the decanting process; it’s about a
fatal nerve agent disguised in a bottle of perfume.
Perhaps you heard about the assassination that became a
public health emergency in England this year. A foreign military wanted to
teach someone a lesson, so they put a deadly chemical in a bottle and sent it
to England, where it poisoned a man and his daughter. It’s still not known how
they came in contact with it, but trace of the chemical was discovered at the
two restaurants they visited that day.
It became a public health emergency because they didn’t
know where the substance came from or where it went, only that these people got
dosed with enough of it to incapacitate them in a very short time. This meant
that anyone in the community could face the same fate, and in fact, many people
could have been affected, or will be affected. A police officer investigating
the incident was poisoned, for example.
Not long after this incident, another couple is struck. A
man finds a bottle of perfume lying around and he gives it to his girlfriend.
She sprays it on her wrists, gets a headache in 15 minutes, passes out in 30,
and dies a few days later. And this happened after a week-long cleanup operation.
I am not sure how big this perfume bottle is, but I will
assume it’s like a sample bottle for promotional purposes. You can get
somewhere between 10 and 100 sprays out of that. This woman died one week after
spraying herself once.
Nerve agents get into your system however they can, even
through the surface of your skin (which is not made of plastic as you may
think, but is more like paper in that it absorbs liquids which can then migrate
into your bloodstream). When these things are used for assassination purposes
they are designed at such a high concentration that they kill the target on the
spot, or at least within a few days.
The way they do this is by disrupting the dance between Acetylcholine
and Acetylcholinesterase that makes your muscles twitch and then relax.
Whenever you do something, your brain sends a nerve signal to your muscles,
acetycholine acts, and a muscle twitches. And then acetylcholinesterase reacts,
and the muscle relaxes. Nerve agents stop the second part from happening; you’re all twitch, no relax.
Uncontrolled release of all bodily fluids including
excessive salivation, drooling, tearing, runny nose, dilated pupils, and
seizures lead to all of your muscles being prevented from relaxing. That leads
to paralysis, especially of the diaphragm muscle. Once the lungs stop working,
they fill with all that excess fluid, with suffocation being the final effect.
Victims who recover can be left with all kinds of
neurological damage, like not being able to sleep, walk, talk, or think, and
that’s not even addressing its other toxic effects on organs like the liver,
for example.
This is the thing – we're not talking about people, individuals,
being harmed here. An entire bottle of this substance (a few cubic centimeters
at most) is enough to poison dozens and potentially hundreds of people. All it
has to do is get into the right place.
So until we can guarantee that military grade chemical
weapons aren’t being carelessly thrown into a garbage can near you, let’s be careful about what we find lying around.
Novichok Was in a
Perfume Bottle, U.K. Victim Says
July 2018, NYTimes
