RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today’s idea: The active ingredient in Botox could pose a grave national security threat if terrorists get hold of enough of the highly lethal toxin on the counterfeit market or figure out how to make it, two biological weapons experts warn.

Nathan Millis for The New York Times Beauty stirring the beast of terror?

Terror | And you thought people with cosmetically frozen facial expressions were scary. Writing in the latest Scientific American, two bio-terror experts, Ken Coleman and Raymond A. Zilinskas, warn about the proliferation of international counterfeiters of the wrinkle-smoothing drug Botox. The worry is that through the counterfeiters, terrorists will be able to obtain or make lethal forms of the drug’s active ingredient, botulinum neurotoxin.

The stuff isn’t such a concern in a typical cosmetic Botox dose — its presence is so minuscule it would take hundreds of vials to kill a person — but it wouldn’t take much to wreak widespread havoc, the two say. As Foreign Policy summarizes their work:

… Botulinum neurotoxin, in its pure form, is ‘the deadliest substance known to science,’ according to Coleman and Zilinskas. It is grouped with the world’s most lethal potential biological weapons agents, sharing ’select agent’ status with the pathogens that cause smallpox, anthrax and plague. How potent is it? One gram could be lethal to 14,285 people if ingested, 1.25 million people if inhaled, and 8.3 million people if injected. The toxin particles block receptors on nerve endings, silencing the nerves and paralyzing surrounding muscles.

Coleman and Zilinskas fear that terrorists may make the connection between the cosmetic uses and the deadly toxin, and find a way to produce or buy the dangerous stuff on the Internet. ‘As security analysts, we undertook two years ago to explore the size and nature of this illicit global trade,’ they write, ‘and have come away gravely concerned that a deadly, but once relatively inaccessible, weapons agent is now becoming as easy to get or to make as a roadside bomb.’ [Scientific American, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post]