Biologists/Doctors: What is Botox?

[John_H]

Is Kay trying to convince us all that Saddam was going to use a cosmetic surgery material to kill us all, or do wrinkly people get WMDs injected into their faces every day?

[enkidu2]

1. what it is

botulin toxin is a neurotoxin which causes paralysis, injected locally it temporarily reverses wrinkles, taken generally (as in when an infant takes in contaminated honey) it causes general paralysis, sometimes requiring a breathing tube to survive

[section321]

2. Wrinkly people get WMD injected into their faces...

We had a client that was trying to figure out how to ship cannisters of Botulin from asia for Botox treatments.

Its a crazy world....

[John_H]

3. mods: do you read posts before you move them?

Although jovially, this post asks a serious question: Kay is trying to say that the botulinum toxin found in the posession of a doctor is a WMD. Botox, used in cosmetic surgery is short for botulinum toxin. I was asking if a doctor could tell us if there was any diference between the two compounds. if not, Kay is trying to pass off BOTX as a WMD. Certainly this is suitible for GD, no?

[Lexingtonian]

4. It's a little more complicated than that

There's a bunch of semantics involved.

Botulinum, the bacterium- it's a bacterium found in the soil everywhere, a fairly standard bacterium that prefers meat in airless surroundings (in soil, worms pretty much get meat that has an aerated environment). So it gets on all food in tiny amounts via soil, but proliferates on certain kinds under certain conditions, sort of like a mold or fungus does.

Botulism- a form of food poisoning, generally lethal, that used to occur in the early days of canning of food. The bacterium grows anaerobically- in the absence of oxygen- and if foodstuff is not properly sterilized but stored in very low oxygen environment, the bacterium grows to large numbers and then the dose of the poison (toxin) it contains becomes large enough to cause disease. The severe illness caused was called 'botulism'. (The bacterium itself is easily destroyed by the human digestive tract, but the poison escapes into the stomach lining and bloodstream.)

Botulism toxin- the poisonous substance of the bacterium. It works to get into and disrupt cells that require certain kinds of external signals to do their function. Iow, it can disable or ultimately kill different kinds of cells, but neurons are by far the most sensitive of the lot. A pure but dilute solution of botulinum toxin is the active material in Botox.

The stuff found in Iraq is botulinum bacterium, not Botox, and it is a 'reference strain'. That means that it is a strain used in bacteriology (research), it was presumably supplied by a U.S. bacteria and cell supplier, and it is not a strain any bioweapons maker would prefer. It may not even work for bioweaponry at all- the 'reference strains' have usually been cultured on laboratory media for hundreds of generations, and may be grossly ineffective compared to strains recovered from one's back yard. A 'reference strain' may well be the worst possible source from which to attempt to make bioweapons, from a biological standpoint.

For bioweapons you want bacteria that are more efficient- 'virulent'- much more specialized and capable of growing in and/or poisoning people than strains found in nature or used in labs. The usual way this is done is to do Darwinian selection- using infected monkeys or people, for a couple of cycles of serial infection. (Getting a factor of 3 increase in virulence per cycle is pretty usual, if I understand the books about Russian bioweapons correctly.) Horrendously unethical stuff, but the whole business is.