Word: aflatoxins
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BIOLOGICAL These are the inspectors' biggest worry right now. Before the Gulf War the Iraqis had a secret germ-weapon program that brewed up and tested huge quantities of several lethal agents, including 8,500 liters of anthrax, 19,000 liters of botulinus and 2,500 liters of aflatoxin. (That's theoretically enough to kill everyone on earth.) They had "weaponized" them by loading them into bombs and missile warheads. Iraq claims it unilaterally destroyed all those weapons after the war, but has never offered proof. U.N. inspectors have been checking more than 80 suspected areas for clandestine storage...
...says Mark Miller, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University, "but even in the best fields, it is only 4 ft. high." And that scrawny crop could be imperiled. According to Joe Pena, also of Texas A&M, corn grown in drought-stressed conditions can develop aflatoxin, a condition that makes the ears essentially poisonous. Some of the reduced crop may have to be destroyed because it is toxic...
...protein the gene makes and 53 for the protein's molecular weight). Smokers who develop lung cancer, Harris has found, show tiny alterations in the p53 gene that differ from those in nonsmokers. They also vary from the changes found in Chinese liver-cancer patients. In the latter group, aflatoxin, a fungal contaminant of food, is the carcinogen, and it alters DNA in an exquisitely precise way, substituting in a single location a T (thymine) for a G (guanine) in DNA's four-letter chemical alphabet...
...would like to demonstrate that aflatoxin can cause the p53 mutation," he said. "This would be direct proof that aflatoxin is a carcinogen...
Strong evidence for aflatoxin's role in liver cancer appeared when researchers found that in four out of five DNA sequences examined, one amino acid, guanine, was converted to anther, thymine. The poison had previously been demonstrated to cause guanine to mutate to thymine in the liver. Hepatitis B, which is another cause of liver cancer, does not cause this same mutation...