Nerve agents overview

This chapter provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the toxicokinetics of OP nerve agents and vesicants. 

Sueh exposure events that lead to poison uptake and its distribution in the organism are part of the invasion proeess whereas all steps eausing poison deerease, e.g. elimination by degradation, metabolism, or exeretion, are part of the evasion proeess. For a better understanding of the pathophysiology and toxieokinetics of chemical warfare agents, an overview of the routes of poison ineorporation follows in the next seetion with a special emphasis on OP nerve agents and vesieants. 

Marrs et al. (1996) and Sidell (1996) have provided an extensive overview of human smdies of nerve agent exposures conducted by the US and the UK military as well as accidental exposures that occurred at production or test facilities. Although this report does not come to any conclusions about long-term effects, there is no indication that asymptomatic exposures to nerve agents have produced long-term, adverse health effects. This is the same conclusion reached by the National Academy of Sciences, committee that reviewed the then available literamre, to include the EEG smdies of Burchfield et al. (1976) and Duffy et al. (1979). They stated that while there may be subtle... 

This chapter presents an overview of the toxic effects associated with inhalation of a nerve agent vapor or aerosol. Many of the studies cited were conducted at the U.S. Army Chemical Biological Center from the 1950s up to the present day. One of the objectives of these studies was to... 

Over a two-decade period the effects of nerve agents were studied in hundreds of volunteer subjects. This chapter provides a history and overview of these studies and, although incomplete, furnishes a general description of the nature of those investigations. It is a tribute to those who conducted the investigations and to the... 

This chapter provides an overview of the management of civilian casualties from nerve agent poisoning and should be read in conjunction with the detailed reviews in Chapter 14 (McDonough and Shih), Chapter 15 (Eyer and Worek), Chapter 16 (Marrs and Sellstrom) and Chapter 12 (Baker). 

The state of the art of liquid chromatography (LC) in respect to the analysis of chemical warfare (CW) agents and their degradation products is presented in this overview. The CW agents considered are the well-known nerve agents (e.g. sarin, tabun, soman and VX) and blister agents (e.g. mustard gas and lewisite) as well as military tear gases. 

Vesicants, including sulfur mustard and lewisite, are the subject of the second main part of this chapter. Coherences of invasion and distribution are presented, and the major processes of biotransformation and elimination caused by binding to proteins [and more prominently, to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)] are discussed. Finally, we make some comments about current bioanalytical approaches. This chapter provides readers with a comprehensive overview of tire toxicokinetics of OP nerve agents and vesicants. 

TABLE 56.1 OVERVIEW OF INVASION PROCESSES OF CWAS Physicochemical Properties of VX and G-Type OP Nerve Agents 819... 

There is a variety of biomarkers that can verify an exposure to sulfur mustard. Table 61.2 shows an overview of these biomarkers. Analogous to the nerve agents, biomarkers can be distinguished in metabolites that are excreted in urine and adducts to proteins. A disadvantage of the major metabolite, thiodiglycol, is that this compoimd is also present in subjects not exposed to sulfur mustard (Black and Read, 1995 Boyer et al., 2004). In that respect, the protein adducts are more reliable biomarkers for sulfur mustard exposure because these biomarkers point unambiguously to an exposure to sulfur mustard. The sulfur mustard adduct to the N-terminal valine of globin can be analyzed after a... 

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