News Stories

A May 25 post by Los Angeles Times health blogger Rosie Mestel cited the findings of a recent study by researchers at the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) regarding the potential for commercially-available counterfeit botox to be used as a bio-weapon. The post references an article in the current Scientific American (subscription only) in which MIIS professors and CNS researchers Ken Coleman and Raymond Zilinskas state that “Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) is grouped with the world’s most lethal potential biological weapons agents… This biowarfare potential puts the existence of illicit laboratories churning out the toxin and of shady distributors selling it worldwide through the Internet into a more disturbing light than most pharmaceutical fraud.”

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Jason Warburg
jwarburg@middlebury.edu
831.647.3156

Eva Gudbergsdottir
eva@middlebury.edu
831.647.6606