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BIOTOXINS IN WARFARE

The first uses of poison in warfare almost certainly involved dabbing them on the points of arrows and spears. Shortly afterward, enterprising strategists began poisoning the water supplies of besieged cities.

Around 600 BC misguided individuals in Delphi's port city, Cirrha, stole land deeded to Apollo's temple.   Called upon to right this wrong, Solon besieged Cirrha and built a dam across the Plesitus River, cutting off the city's water supply. Drinking well and rain water, the Cirrhaeans held on for several months. Solon then tossed hellebore roots into the dammed water, let them dissolve and then released the river to its channel. The Cirrhaeans drank the water and developed violent and uncontrollable diarrhea.   With the defenders otherwise occupied, Solon seized the unguarded walls. Such practices were widespread. During the second year of the Peloponnesian War in 430 BC when plague broke out in Athens, the Spartans were accused of poisoning the cisterns of the Piraeus, the source of most of Athens' water.

There were other methods as well. In 401 BC Xenophon led his Greek soldiers in a hasty retreat from Babylon. To the Greeks the campsite near Trabzon looked very much like heaven.   Fish were available from the nearby sea, the hills were covered with beautiful rhododendrons, and the woods harbored rich beehives. The soldiers than feasted on honeycombs.  The result, as Xenophon recorded, was unpleasant.

All the soldiers who ate of the honeycombs lost their senses, and were seized with vomiting and purging, none of them being able to stand on their legs. Those who ate but a little were like men very drunk, and those who ate much, like madmen and some like dying persons. In this condition great numbers lay on the ground, as if there had been a defeat, and the sorrow was general. The next day none of them died, but recovered their senses about the same hour they were seized. And the third day they got up as if they had taken a strong potion.

Xenophon had been lucky.   The pursuing Colchian army had not attacked during the army's prostration and near impotence.

In 67 BC the Roman General Pompey set out to conquer King Mithridates IV of Pontus. Over the course of a year Mithridates slowly retreated before the Roman advance until the two armies confronted one another near Trabzon, on the black sea coast of Turkey.   Although the Romans thought the retreat was unplanned the maneuver and the direction were urged by Mithradites chief adviser, the Greek physician Kateuas.

Pompey's hungry troops repeated the honey-feasting of Xenophon's troops. Modern science calls the poison in Trabzon's honey a grayanotoxin. Grayanotoxins are produced by various species of rhododendrons and laurels and are present in the nectar of these plants, which is collected by bees for making honey. The toxins selectively bind to the sodium channels in cell membranes.   When excitable cells such as those in nerves or muscles start pumping sodium out through their membranes grayanotoxins prevent the pumps from turning off, and so the cells remain in an excited state. Like the Greek army three and a half century earlier, the Romans went into drunken convulsions.   This time the Pontians, cued by Kateuas, were waiting for the result of the "mad honey poisoning."    The army did not escape but was massacred.

YELLOW RAIN

War continued to be fought through the millenia and poisons were used whenever it was considered advantageous. In World War I synthetic chemical weapons were used for the first time with deadly effect. The emphasis on these weapons and their control caused many to forget that the biotoxins still existed.

On September 13, 1981 Alexander Haig, then Secretary of State accused Soviet-backed Communist forces in Southeast Asia of using a novel toxin weapon in Southeast Asia -- "potent mycotoxins, poisonous substances not indigenous to the region and which are highly toxic to man and animals."

The basis of the charge was the analysis of a leaf, a one inch length of stem and fragments of other leaves from an area on the Thai/Cambodia border which Vietnamese planes allegedly attacked.   The samples were carefully parceled out to a handful of laboratories for analysis. Biologists, unaware of the source of their samples, concluded that the leaf was covered by Fusaria fungus and contained three different mycotoxins. The concentrations were 20 times higher than any recorded natural outbreak.   Further supporting this were reports among refugees that they had been subjected to air attacks by low flying planes that had diffused a yellow powder. After exposure to this "yellow rain" they became ill with a variety of symptoms suggestive of T2 toxin poisoning and many died.

The mycotoxin reported was a T2 toxin. In the ensuing months controversy surrounded the charges.   Evidence suggested that the State Department did not know what it was talking about when it claimed the mycotoxin did not appear in Southeast Asia, which it did. Some scientists suggested that the "toxin" was actually little more than bee feces which was eventually proven to be the case.   Anthropologists raised serious objections to the way interviews were conducted with the underlying assumption on the part of the interviewer being that an attack had occurred.  They questioned the American government's motive in making the charge, suggesting it was part of a propaganda ploy to step up chemical and biological warfare production.

The critics had their own axes to grind. The most vociferous were participants and architects of the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention. Evidence that the Soviet Union was producing mycotoxins would invalidate the crowning achievement of their careers. No resolution has ever been achieved in the case, but it serves as a reminder of how difficult detecting such weapons can be.

Note: Mithradites was fearful of being poisoned and adopted the practice of building up resistance to poisons by taking increasingly larger doses.