As if frozen smiles and motionless foreheads aren’t scary enough, apparently we now need to worry about terrorists getting their hands on botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in Botox and one of the world’s deadliest poisons.
According to the Washington Post, illegal Botox factories in locales including China and Chechnya pose a very real threat to us all as terrorists are now more likely than ever to source the poison for use in widespread attacks. Seeing as how a mere sand-sized speck of the stuff in it’s pure form can kill a 150 pound person, the thought of this is quite scary.
A would-be Bin Laden needs little more than a shipping address to obtain counterfeit Botox on-line, says the Post. And apparently Al Queda, Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo and Hezbollah have already experimented with the toxin as a weapon — luckily to no avail.
The news source also says that a biologist with a master’s degree and $2,000 worth of equipment could easily make a gram of pure toxin in a garage-sized lab. Can you say freaky?
But the good news is that it would take hundreds of vials of Botox, which contains only a tiny amount of the toxin, to kill one person. Lets hope the terrorists aren’t hoarders. Officials in China and Russia are currently searching out and trying to shut down illegal factories in their countries. But the job is proving tougher than they’d like. Yikes.
In the meantime, we’d better keep tabs on Nicole Kidman. If someone were to wring out her face, we’d all be in trouble.
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