(13 Mar 2018) LEADIN:
Chemical experts say the nerve agent used to attack a former Russian spy and his daughter behaves differently to those previously used and is in a class of substances deadlier than similar chemicals like sarin or VX.
It's taken a week to name the agent called Novichok, and chemists believe it was chosen because it would be harder to identify. Britain has told the Russian government to respond by midnight tonight.
STORYLINE:
More than a week after the attack on a quiet Sunday afternoon, British chemical experts have finally revealed what they know about the nerve agent used to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
Police and chemical scientists still scour the five areas around the small town of Salisbury where the former spy lived.
The nerve agent they were exposed to is known as Novichok, translated as Novice. Although it is a weapon developed in the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, it is relatively new.
With Novichok, you have the potential for a slower-release agent, which gives you much more control according to Professor Andrea Sella from University College London.
He also believes as a military grade agent it indicates Russian involvement.
According to Sella: "This is not the kind of chemistry you're going to do in a garden shed, or that I would as a chemist do in a garden shed, in fact not even in a lab, and the reason is because you really need extreme containment. These are things that are typically done in specialist facilities, by people who are highly trained and where you have means of totally scrubbing these materials from the air around. And so this already starts to narrow down very, very quickly, you know, who might be behind this, and you know you've got to have access to the right sorts of facilities in order to do it."
Novichok refers to a class of nerve agents developed in the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War. The agents were ostensibly created in an attempt to avoid the international chemical weapons treaty that had just been signed; any new substances wouldn't be subject to past treaties.
Nerve agents are typically inhaled or absorbed through the skin, this animation shows how they work by blocking a key enzyme that controls communication between nerve cells and muscles and how inhibiting the enzyme causes muscles and glands to be overstimulated.
Sella explains: "If you think about your nervous system it's not simply continuous wires right. The nerves are actually broken into sections. There's a gap in between called the synaps and when the nerve signal comes down the nerve, what's called the neurotransmitter acetylcholine is produced and travels across that gap and what it does is it stimulates the next nerve to fire. Now the key thing here is that you have to reset that mechanism. There's a very specific enzyme that goes and eliminates the neurotransmitter. So that's the enzyme that these act on."
The impact of a chemical attack on the nerves is extreme: "What happens is that the nervous system just fires wildly and so you get all these bizarre symptoms of paralysis and convulsions at the same time, you know you look at somebody's eyes and they have a pinpoint pupil. That means the patient, the victim you know the world goes very dark and becomes very, very blurry, they also start to salivate and the lungs start to secrete a lot of liquid in the hopes of trying to counter this agent and therefore someone finds it unbelievably hard to breathe." says Sella.
Sella says the physical damage suffered in the time after being exposed to a nerve agent is irreversible and speedy treatment is vital.
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