Word: toxin
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...least two dissatisfied former employees are suing. Richard Crosland, 55, a microbiologist suing for age discrimination after his 1997 layoff, worked primarily with botulinum toxin. "7-Eleven had better inventory controls than USAMRIID," he says. "The inventories were pretty much a joke. People often just filled them in using last month's forms. In my 11 years there, they never once asked for my botulinum toxin records. If I had taken it all home--which of course I didn't--no one would have known." How can he be sure? "After I was fired," says Crosland, "I made three trips...
Michael Doyle, director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia, says terrorists could lace such imports with not only botulism toxin but also other pathogens, including E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, dysentery, cyclospora and hepatitis. As if to underscore the point, investigators last week identified salmonella in two of several plastic vials of undisclosed substances included in a packet of papers sent to former President Clinton's office in Harlem, though the bacteria apparently grew naturally through fermentation and caused no harm. Still, the concerns of Thompson and his colleagues are understandable. Even without any diabolical...
...TOXINS ATTACH TO CELL One of the toxins, called protective antigen, attaches to a receptor found on most cells. When seven of them find their mark, they latch together, forming a ring with a hole in its center. Then one of the other toxins--either a killing toxin or a swelling toxin--plugs the hole...
...preparing new forms of terrorism. In May 1997, an Algerian extremist in London was arrested in possession of a scientific work on botulism. During the 1998 dismantling of a militant Islamist network in Belgium, police found on one of the leaders a document detailing the military applications of botulism toxin in aerosol form. The bin Laden operatives arrested in Brussels after Sept. 11 were known associates of some of those apprehended in the 1998 raid...
...estimated several hundred metric tons of the raw materials required to make sarin and mustard gas. After years of denying that it even had a biological-weapons program, Iraq admitted in 1995 that it had produced 8,500 liters of concentrated anthrax and 19,000 liters of undiluted botulinum toxin. UNSCOM destroyed most of those supplies, but officials believe that Iraq hid four times as much anthrax and twice as much botulinum as was discovered. Iraq still has the best biological expertise in the region--thanks in part to the efforts of Rihab Taha, 48, a British-educated biochemist known...