Posted on 10/23/2001 6:44:41 PM PDT by Aquinasfan
FWIW, their food irradiation technology is a seperately held public company called SureBeam with Titan Corp holding about 80% of the stock.
I seem to remember about ten years ago that the USPS wanted to go to standardized envelopes to facilitate automatic sorting. Maybe that idea will be revived, only with some "enhancements" that might confound this kind of biological attack. (Special seal? Biocidal agents?)
Probably the only ones that have done a dose-response curve for Anthrax spores is the U.S. Army, and they're not talking.
I couldn't find much with a google.com search. Maybe I should try again with that additional information you provided.
I just bought some BREL. Bioreliance. They make smallpox vaccine. Up from 12 to 29 in the weeks after the WTC attack.
This does not bode well for those of us who get our Sea Monkeys through the mail...
Mark W.
Sorry to be picky, but the dose of radiation from a chest x-ray is 0.25 millirad which means 4000 chest x-rays=1 rad (cGy). 100 cGy=1Gy.
5 MegaGy (5 million Gy) necessary for anthrax spore kill is equivalent to 20,000,000,000 (20 billion) chest x-rays!
Funny, but definitely sick.
With the increasing involvement of U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf region, military authorities have become increasingly concerned about the threat that anthrax and other biological warfare agents pose to armed forces and civilian populations. Spores of the deadly bacteria anthrax are a major concern. How do you wash them off? What if you've inhaled them? Concentrated chlorine bleach and formaldehyde are known to kill anthrax spores, but they're also toxic to humans.
A mixture of water, soybean oil, Triton X 100 detergent and the solvent tri-n-butyl phosphate developed by the University of Michigan and Novavax, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company in Columbia, Maryland, seems to offer great promise in the anthrax wars. A milky-white emulsion of tiny lipid droplets suspended in solvent, it has been shown to be remarkably effective against anthrax and related bacteria as well as certain viruses.
In studies with rats and mice in the U-M School under the direction of James R. Baker, Jr., M.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the Center for Biologic Nanotechnology, the mixture, known as BCTP, attacked anthrax spores and healed wounds caused by a closely related species of bacteria, cereus. (The letters BCTP stand for Bi-Component, Triton X-100 n-tributyl Phosphate.)
Baker describes the process as follows: "The tiny lipid droplets in BCTP fuse with anthrax spores, causing the spores to revert to their active bacterial state. During this process, takes 4-5 hours, the spore's tough outer membrane changes, allowing BCTP's solvent strip away the exterior membrane. The detergent then degrades the spores' interior contents. In scanning electron microscope images, the spores appear to explode." The rapid inactiva- tion of anthrax bacteria and spores combined with BCTP's low toxicity thus make the emulsion a promising candidate for use as a broad-spectrum, post-exposure decontamination agent.
In separate experiments, Baker and his staff have found that BCTP, when inserted into nasal passages of mice infected with live influenza A virus, and when incubated with canine kidney cells infected with the virus, greatly reduces viral antigen levels. "Our preliminary studies have shown that BTCP is a highly effective killing agent for the influenza virus both at the cellular level and in living animals," Baker says. "Equally important is that BCTP has no toxic effects on nasal or lung passages. It appears that if we treat the virus as it enters the nasal passages, we can prevent infection in mice.
The next step is to see whether we can administer BCTP and the virus separately and still prevent infection. The final step, of course, is to see whether it works in people." In future studies Baker plans to evaluate BCTP's effectiveness against inhaled anthrax spores as well as other bacteria and viruses.
The research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Baker can be reached at jbakerjr@umich.edu
P.S. I would like to do research on the application of Jim Beam or some other fine Burbon to small samples of virus & germs. First I would inject small cultures of virus and/or bacteria in to Jim Beam and examine how long it takes to kill the critters, then (depending upon the source and concentration and deadness of the critters) drink the final liquid so as to bio-filter it prior to recyling the liquids in the local sanitary sewer system.
You know, maybe we should use 100-year old Napolean Brandy to start with? (/sarcasm)
Seriously this stuff sounds interesting how the detergent and liquid create different forces on the virus and bacteria at a celular membrane level.
Yes. Isn't some packaged food irradiated?
We know the anthrax spores are resistant to just about everything. But getting them to "blossom" before attacking them sounds like a viable solution to me.
Surely, if this method was effective against Antrhax spores, the feds would persue it. Wouldn't they?
I checked the novavax.com website, and nothing there...
Yes. That seems to be a contradiction in the original statement. I'm still looking for some reliable information on killing antrax spores.
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