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Botulism case said tied to carrot juice TAMPA, Fla. - Investigators believe botulism toxin from bottled carrot juice paralyzed a woman, the fourth person thought to be poisoned by bacteria in the drink. The unidentified woman is unresponsive and has been hospitalized since mid-September, said Jylmarie Kintz, epidemiologist for the Hillsborough County Health Department. Three people in Georgia experienced respiratory failure and remain hospitalized on ventilators since drinking the bottled carrot juice a month ago, according to federal officials. The trio were from Washington County, Ga., and shared a meal Sept. 7 that included carrot juice made by Bolthouse Farms,...

TAMPA, Fla. -- Investigators believe botulism toxin from bottled carrot juice paralyzed a woman, the fourth person thought to be poisoned by bacteria in the drink. The unidentified woman is unresponsive and has been hospitalized since mid-September, said Jylmarie Kintz, epidemiologist for the Hillsborough County Health Department. Three people in Georgia also became ill after drinking the bottled juice made by Bolthouse Farms, according to the Food and Drug Administration. In a dispatch issued Friday, the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the three were from Washington County, Ga., and shared a meal, which included carrot juice...

Sun staff writer The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to drink carrot juice from Bolthouse Farms. The warning comes in response to a fourth case of botulism being linked to the brand, produced by Bolthouse Farms of Bakersfield, Calif. Consumers should discard any 450 milliliter or 1 liter plastic bottles of the carrot juice with a "best if used by" date of Nov. 11 or earlier. The FDA is also reiterating its advice to consumers to keep carrot juice - including pasteurized carrot juice - refrigerated. The fourth case of botulism poisoning involves a woman in Florida...

A serious disease outbreak in the northern province of Nan had Army weapons specialists and US disease investigators on full alert Monday. Almost 150 people in the province have been stricken with botulism, a rare yet lethal bacterial disease that could potentially be used as a biological weapon. Health authorities have sought international assistance treating the patients. US military biological weapons experts have been flown into Nan, as have World Health Organisation disease specialists, said Thai Disease Control Department chief Thawat Suntharacharn. Since March 4, 143 villagers in Nan's Ban Luang district have been diagnosed as suffering from botulism, a...

A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year was likely used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components. Kurdish forces seized the trailer in April 2003 at a checkpoint near Mosul in northern Iraq. At the time, the unit was hailed as the closest U.S. forces may had come to finding a "smoking gun" in their search for...

The Chronicle for Higher Education is reporting that the National Academy of Sciences has published a paper on how terrorists could kill tens of thousands of people by dropping a few grams of botulinum toxin into a milk truck or storage silo. The Academy published the paper over protests by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The paper, authored by two Stanford University researchers, was scheduled to have been published in the academy's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a month ago but the academy had held the paper because of the concerns leveled by HHS. The...

WHILE the anthrax scare at Washington post offices this year proved to be a false alarm, it was a reminder of how vulnerable Americans are to biological terrorism. In general, two threats are viewed as the most dangerous: anthrax, which is as durable as it is deadly, and smallpox, which is transmitted very easily and kills 30 percent of its victims. But there is a third possibility that, while it seems far more mundane, could be just as deadly: terrorists spreading a toxin that causes botulism throughout the nation's milk supply. Why milk? In addition to its symbolic value as...

Terrorists from al-Qaeda have been making chemical and biological weapons in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Tuesday. Speaking at a world conference on bio-terrorism in Lyons that was organized by Interpol, he said that “several al-Qaeda cells have been trained in Afghanistan where they have learned to use biological agents including anthrax, ricin and botulism toxins. Later, after the fall of the Taliban regime, those groups continued their experiments in the Pankisi Gorge, on the territory of Georgia, bordering Chechnya,” Interfax news agency reported. The minister added that al-Qaeda terrorists “were able to use...

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 5:50 a.m. ET DARTMOUTH, Mass. (AP) -- The war on terror could have an unlikely ally in a modest mollusk known as the quahog. Researchers who injected the clams with enough botulism toxin to kill 1,000 people found the shellfish somehow neutralized the enzyme, which is considered a potential bioterror agent. ``Botulism activity was cut in half by the blood of the quahog,'' Dr. Bal Ram Singh told The Standard Times of New Bedford in Wednesday's editions. ``So we think there is some sort of antidote in this blood. If we are able to...

WEST PALM BEACH - Health officials are investigating whether two patients being treated for botulism contracted the illness after receiving Botox injections. The unidentified couple in their 50s were both in critical condition Sunday night, breathing through ventilators and receiving intravenous feeding, said Charles Schallop, a neurologist treating them at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center. Hospital officials did not immediately return a call Monday to update their condition.

Bioterror Defense - Forbes staff, 08.13.04, 6:00 AM ET NEW YORK - Pharmathene is one of a smattering of small and undercapitalized biotechnology outfits trying to develop either vaccines or antidotes for anthrax, which remains, in the opinion of a lot of experts, the most likely weapon to be used against the U.S. in a bioterror attack. The threat of biological attack is considered so serious that President George W. Bush in late July signed Project Bioshield, creating a $5.6 billion fund to stockpile treatments for smallpox, botulism and anthrax over ten years, without the need for approval from the...

Texas Grocer to Pay $2.85 Million to Six Made Ill by Tainted Chili The Associated Press FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - A Fort Worth discount grocer has agreed to pay $2.85 million to settle a lawsuit filed by six people who were hospitalized for botulism after eating the store's tainted chili. The plaintiffs were among eight people who ate the chili at a church concert in 2001 and became sick enough to be hospitalized. A lawsuit against the Fort Worth-based chili distributor, Ben E. Keith, is pending. Town Talk Foods, meanwhile, is suing Keith and the chili manufacturer, First Original...

Six suspected Islamic extremists including the imam of a Lyon area mosque were due to appear before anti-terrorist judges here amid allegations they knew about plans for a chemical attack in France in 2002. Chellali Benchellali, an imam in the Lyon suburb of Venissieux, his wife Hafsa, his son Hafed and two others were detained last week in a series of raids near the eastern city. The sixth suspect was detained southeast of Paris. They were taken into custody as part of a 2002 probe ordered by Paris anti-terrorist judges into a so-called "Chechen network" of Islamic radicals with links...

Al-Qaida terror plot foiled, say French police Jon Henley in Paris Monday January 12, 2004 The Guardian (UK) The French police are convinced that their country has escaped a planned chemical or biological attack by an Islamist cell linked to al-Qaida. An interior ministry official said evidence from Islamist militants arrested in the Lyon area last week made it "very plain" that an attack with the deadly botulism or ricin toxins was being actively prepared. The eight suspects arrested on Tuesday were mainly relatives of Menad Benchellali, the son of a radical imam in the Lyon suburb of Venisseux, who...

On biological weapons, a single vial of a strain of botulinum, a poison that can be used as a weapon, located at the home of a known biological weapons scientist

Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral...

Reported to be "a biotoxin"

Daan Goosen's calling card to the FBI was a vial of bacteria he had freeze-dried and hidden inside a toothpaste tube for secret passage to the US. From among hundreds of flasks in his Pretoria lab, the South African scientist picked a man-made strain that was sure to impress: a microbial Frankenstein that fused the genes of a common intestinal bug with DNA from the pathogen that causes the deadly illness gas gangrene. "This will show the Americans what we are capable of," Mr Goosen said then. On May 6 last year, Mr Goosen slipped the parcel to a retired...

BioTerrorism Analysis: Weaponsized Infectious Disease and Emerging Disease (A Free Republic Technical Analysis) About five weeks ago, I started a technical thread that analyzed the space shuttle disaster which killed an international flight crew and lead to wreckage over the southwestern United States. In that thread, we had a remarkable range of technical and analytical skills which this website brought to bear. Because we are anonymous, we can pursue fact without fear of the liberals killing our careers or worse. Tonight, I seek to create a thread on a more serious national security problem, biological weapons of mass destruction and...

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 08, 2003 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- In a 173-page dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix says Baghdad may possess about 10,000 liters of anthrax, Scud missile warheads filled with deadly biological and chemical agents, and drones that far exceed the 150-kilometer (93-mile) limit. The report, obtained late Friday by The Associated Press, traces the history of Iraq's weapons programs and outlines the many areas where questions remain - many old but some new. Blix told the Security Council earlier in the day that he planned to cull the document...