The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced on Tuesday that 86% of the declared stockpile – including nearly 90% of the highest priority, most lethal, agents – had been delivered to the Mediterranean port of Latakia by the Assad government and loaded on to Scandinavian freighters in preparation for eventual destruction.
The average case-fatality rate was 10.5% and the most lethal agents were Streptococcus pneumoniae (27%) and Haemophilus influenzae type b (10.7%).
And it would have to last a long time.Syria's stocks of chemical weaponry are large: French intelligence estimates talk of tens of tonnes of VX, the most lethal nerve agent, and hundreds of tonnes of both sarin, another nerve agent, and mustard gas.
Paraquat (24% w/v) is one of the most commonly used herbicides in Taiwan and has been the most common lethal agent of poisoning for a long time [ 2, 24, 44, 45].
Philby was perhaps the most lethal double agent in the annals of British espionage.
Special vaccines have been created, tested, and approved to deal with the two most lethal biological agents that can also be most easily weaponized: anthrax and smallpox.
The most common lethal agents in study were paraquat, organophosphate, and digoxin.
In the last years, a vast body of information regarding the interaction of short synthetic peptides (∼20-mer long) derived from the amino acid sequences of Plasmodium falciparum proteins (the most lethal and prevalent agent of human malaria responsible for 500 million cases per year, of which 3 million result in death [1]); with their corresponding host cell receptor have been obtained [2] [8].
Of these, DSBs are believed to be one of the most lethal damages induced by DNA damaging agents (Collis et al, 2005).
DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) generated by ionizing radiation and chemotherapeutic agents are the most lethal form of damage, and are repaired via either homologous recombination (HR) or non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathways.
