Some variants of Novichok are thought to be five to eight times more toxic than the VX nerve agent. "This is a more dangerous and sophisticated agent than sarin or VX and is harder to identify," says Professor Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading.
By disrupting the nervous system, Novichok and other nerve agents can kill people through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest. We know they are deadly. The nerve agent Sarin caused multiple casualties in 1995 when it was released in the Tokyo subway.
According to Google, there has been a huge increase in the search term “Novichok half life”. Radioactive substances can have very long half lives, from seconds up to several billion years (for uranium-238). The polonium that killed Litvinenko had a half life of 138 days.
Eventually, you die either through asphyxiation or cardiac arrest. The chemicals work by disrupting the central nervous system. The body uses a molecule called acetylcholine to send messages between cells – when an acetylcholine molecule “arrives”, it causes an electrical impulse to be sent.
Most of the Novichok molecule would remain linked to one of the fragments and would be easy to detect by mass spectrometry, says Oksana Lockridge, a toxicologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Nerve agents are highly toxic chemicals that poison the body's central nervous system and prevent it from working properly. They are fast-acting. At high doses, they can cause a victim to go into immediate convulsions and suffocate or die from cardiac arrest.
Exposure is lethal even at very low concentrations, where death can occur within one to ten minutes after direct inhalation of a lethal dose, due to suffocation from respiratory paralysis, unless antidotes are quickly administered.
Organophosphate Nerve Agents [e.g. Sarin (GB), Soman (GD), Tabun (GA), VX] are rapidly acting and highly toxic. Organophosphate-based pesticides exhibit the same physiological reaction and are considered extremely poisonous. Accidental exposure to these substances may occur.
Organophosphate pesticides such as parathion are in the same chemical class as nerve agents. Although these pesticides are much less toxic, their effects and medical treatments are the same as for military-grade nerve agents. Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, is capable of causing mass casualties.
Nerve agents or nerve gasses are chemical weapons which attack a person's nervous system and prevent their body from functioning properly. Sarin Gas, VX and Thallium are all nerve agents but ricin is not. Sarin is a colourless and odourless agent that was outlawed in April 1997 by the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Unlike chemical nerve agents such as organophosphates or sarin gas, which immediately incapacitate victims, mustard gas victims typically don't exhibit symptoms of poisoning until 12 to 24 hours after exposure. However, higher concentrations of the gas can cause symptoms to develop within one to two hours.
Tabun is a nerve agent that is clear, colorless, tasteless, and can have a slight fruity odor or none at all. It can be inhaled, absorbed through the skin, or ingested. Nerve agents act very quickly in vapor form; longer in liquid form.
Sarin is a human-made chemical warfare agent classified as a nerve agent. Nerve agents are the most toxic and rapidly acting of the known chemical warfare agents.
Regardless of the route of exposure, nerve agents can cause the following characteristic effects:
- pinpoint pupils of the eye.
- excessive production of mucous, tears, saliva and sweat.
- headache.
- stomach pain, nausea and vomiting.
- chest tightness and shortness of breath.
- loss of bladder and bowel control.
- muscle twitching.
