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Until today, the home canned food ingestion and infant botulism caused by consumption of the spores of botulinum bacteria were the major causes of botulism representing around 200 cases per year in the U.S.
Nowadays, terrorism has become a real threat and botulinum toxin has already been used as a bioweapon three times in Japan between 1990 and 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo terrorist organization. Although these attacks failed for technical reasons, the risk is still there.
Development and use of botulinum toxin as a possible bioweapon began at least 60 years ago, and US army as well as German army worked on biological weapons programs with botulinum toxin during World War II.
“Although the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention prohibited offensive research and production of biological weapons, signatories Iraq and the Soviet Union subsequently produced botulinum toxin for use as a weapon. Since that time, four of the countries listed by the US government as "state sponsors of terrorism" (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Syria) have developed, or are believed to be developing, botulinum toxin as a weapon. “ JAMA 1997;278
It is noteworthy that beside its extreme potency and lethality, botulinum toxin is easy to produce, to store and to transport.
Botulinum toxoid vaccine has been available for many years and is still the treatment of reference if conducted on time. The clinical diagnosis is not simple but remains the foundation for early recognition of the disease as laboratory testing technology still requires days to be completed and so far can only be used as confirmation test.
Another way to fight against the terrorism threat is either the early detection of the source of the contamination or to monitor regularly high potential vectors of toxin as water distribution networks, mineral water, milk and baby food manufacturers.
For this reason Pharmaleads has developed EzyBot a field product containing the detection equipment and reagents adapted to field constraints to give an answer within hald an hour or one hour to a suspected presence of Botulinum Toxin A and B.
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