Toxicology of Vesicants

Chemical Warfare Toxicology, Volume 1 Fundamental Aspects Edited by Franz Worek, John Jenner, and Horst Thiermann The Royal Society of Chemistry 2016 Published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, www.rsc.org 

In the years between WWI and WWII other mustards were experimented with and the nitrogen mustards showed some effectiveness as vesicant CWAs, although they were never weaponised. 

This chapter describes the toxicology of the vesicants. There is a large amount of literature on the toxicology of these agents and any account must be selective. For additional accounts the reader is referred to one of the many authoritative reviews published over the past 20years.  

Many of the reports of studies carried out in the early years of vesicant research lack certain pieces of vital information or were poorly designed by modern standards. In many reviews these studies are excluded for understandable reasons. These reports are reviewed here and their short comings highlighted, because they contain valuable information and some of the observations made are not reported elsewhere. 

commonly known as mustard gas , was one of the first chemicals used in modern warfare. Since its use on the battlefield of Ypres in 1917 it has been used for little else but to wage war. In civil use it found brief employment as an anticancer agent during the 1960s, and has been used at low concentrations in creams used to treat psoriasis, but its association with the production of cancer terminated its use in medicine. With the formation of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to enforce the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), SM is only likely to be encountered in dealings with non-compliant nations, anti-terrorist operations, during demilitarisation operations or in defence research. 

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