In many situations, personnel may be in the presence of an unknown chemical substance. It may be a first responder on a mission during an intervention in a university chemistry laboratory (I have personally experienced such a situation!), a chemical waste manager who has just been informed of old full cans that have been dumped…
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Reading various articles about the development of chemical weapons by the German army, we can see that many German scientists, including 8 of them who have already been awarded or are about to receive a Nobel Prize, have participated in this work. But to what extent have they really been involved? Working on the biographies…
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Strange animal that the bat is! The only flying mammal (the flying squirrel can only glide from one tree to another), it is guided by an echolocation system by emitting ultrasounds (12,000 to 100,000 hertz) that it recovers the echo in its ears. With a lifespan of 20 to 30 years, it lives on average…
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The security police, who are responsible for maintaining security during the demonstrations that are taking place in our country, may have been targeted by jets of corrosive products such as strong acids. This is an opportunity for us to review chemical burns: how do the products work, what are the emergency treatments? A glimpse of…
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An article in Nature on February 26, 2019 reports that the United States has just adopted a new response protocol in response to an attack or following a chemical industrial accident, which is important for at least two reasons: The new protocol, including dry decontamination, will significantly improve the care provided to victims; It is…
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What is this about? In the case of contamination by chemical warfare agents, acidic projections or industrial chemicals, it is imperative to have a decontamination process in place to quickly remove dangerous agents from the surface on which they have been dispersed. Immediate decontamination (military concept) or emergency decontamination (medical concept) is generally carried out…
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In a mini-review published in “ADC Letters for infectious disease control”, Eto A. and Kanatani Y. explain how Japan is preparing for a possible bioterrorist attack. The strategy to make Japan “the safest country in the world” is based on a “Sakigake” pilot project to promote the development of innovative drugs and other medical devices….
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At a time when we are rightly concerned about the evolution of bacteria towards greater resistance to antibiotics, we are seeing the reappearance of a method for fighting pathogenic bacteria, invented by Félix d’Hérelle. The first tested humans were in 1919: phagotherapy is 100 years old. Félix d’Hérelle A self-taught French-Canadian microbiologist born in…
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The French Society of Disaster Medicine has just organized a session “Children and Disasters” in order to better understand the problems raised by children who are victims of a disaster. This gave us the opportunity to review the literature on pediatric decontamination that we propose to you here. Special vulnerabilities of children Smaller in…
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An excellent article entitled “Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment” written by Christos Lynteris has just been published in the journal Medical Anthropology (2018). Through the invention of masks to protect the respiratory tract against infectious agents, in this case the plague microbe, the author shows us that these devices can…
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