allergies

[zeocrash]

OK i my hayfever started this week (major bummer), but this got me thinking about the use of things such as pollen as incapacitating agents.
Hayfever is relatively common, and can be very inconvenient. Imagine this then, you have a large body of troops comeing into your country, and to slow them down, you spray them with pollen. now this pollen gets down and causes hayfever in a significant propotrion of the army, but they will not know to protect against it as their detectors are looking for chemical weapons, not common things such as pollen.
another substance (for more lethal puropses) would be peanut oil. some people have very severe / lethal alergies to peanut oil, and so a vapourised cloud of this could have very severe consequences for the troops. meaning that they would have to stop and tend to the affected soldiers
This is really a theoretical idea, any comments.

[Anthony]

I don't think the pollen is such a great idea, as the effect is small compared to the effort of releasing it over the troops - you might as well just drop something harmful.

Peanut oil might be good, as long as the allergy isn't too uncommon. It's easily available and harmless for an average person to handle. Only a small number of the target would have any effect, but when the immune targets see their comrades clucthing their swelling throats and dropping dead, they're going to become rapidly paranoid about a gas attack, though their detectors show nothing.

Until they could get verification that there is no real gas/nerve attack, and that their detectors aren't playing up, they'd probably stop advancing or even fall back.

[MrSamosa]

I believe that the best allergy to exploit would be Poison Ivy. Poison Ivy oil (its actual name eludes me at the moment) can be quite dangerous when burnt...many states in the US have outlawed burning Poison Ivy for this reason. As you would imagine, on inhalation it causes intense irritation and swelling, thus blocking the respiratory system. Also, Poison Ivy is not terribly difficult to find.

[A-BOMB]

I can tell you poison ivy is the most evil plant ever created! My mother with get it just walking past it or washing my work clothes after I've been out cutting it down (teach that damn plant to grow over my fence!) but some people don't get it. For example my grandmother can reach into the bush and rip it out of the ground bare handed and not get it the same with my father, me I got a 50/50 odds of getting it some times I can walk right through it and not get it and sometimes I do. But then there is my mothers side of the family they get it just by looking at it (well except my grandfather). So it it may not be the best anti-personal weapon.

[darkdontay]

Some people though have random Allergies, for me;

These used to be deathly allergic to thogh now they just make me very sick for a day.

MSG
Red Dye 40
Yellow 4,5

It would be nice to find some data on Most common allergies, ones of which people are deathly allergic and then build from their...

It would be sweet to have just a couple drops of peanut oil be all you need to drop someone. It would not draw much attention and whop would think to check you for it?

[xyz]

A lot of people are allergic to bee stings, does anyone know if this is an allergy to methanoic acid or is there a small amount of something else in the sting?

I have no known allergies.

<small>[ April 12, 2003, 06:19 AM: Message edited by: xyz ]</small>

[metafractal]

I think bees are unique in the insect world. From what I've read they dont use formic acid like ants/beetles/just about anything else do, but instead the complex organic substance hyaluronidase. It makes sense when you think about it- how many people do you hear about that are allergic to ant bites?
At first hyaluronidase looks like a protein, but examination in rasmol reveals that its just a very complicated organic compound.
For a very brief description of its chemistry along with a .pdb model (click on the picture at the top, you'll need rasmol- <a href="http://www.openrasmol.org/" target="_blank">www.openrasmol.org/</a>), see <a href="http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/mom/hyaluronidase/hyaluronidase.html" target="_blank">this</a> page.

[xyz]

Interesting, I thought bee stings were methanoic acid, this would make sense because people use bases to ease the pain of bee stings. Or is it that the compound that you have just mentioned is acidic and is destroyed by the bases?

[metafractal]

I did some more research, and found that bee venom is actually made up of 18 different substances, hyaluronidase is just one major component of them. See <a href="http://www.apitherapy.com/beevcomp.htm" target="_blank">this page</a> for the composition. I was wrong about hyaluronidase not being a protein. It actually is one, but no one is sure of it's exact structure. The model provided in my previous post is only an approximation, so rasmol could not recognize that it was a protein. It is very hard to determine the acidity of proteins, but it is very uncommon for them to be acuteley basic or acidic. I doubt its straightforward as to why a base would break down some of these compounds. It could be that they're all suspended in formic acid. Then, when you put a base on it, it either just neutralizes the formic acid and leaves all the other components active, or maybe the formic acid is required to catylize the burning affects of the other components of the bee venom, thereby rendering them inactive. I'm no biologist, so I'll leave the question open to others.

<small>[ April 12, 2003, 11:39 PM: Message edited by: metafractal ]</small>

[darkdontay]

I have been looking a little bit so far, but ws wondering if any colleges have complied a top 10 list of most common deadly allergies that could very well lead to a nice start.. I like the ieda of bee venom, but I would see it as a very complx protein that would not lend easily to being created in the home workshop lab.

[Anthony]

I'm not sure about the suitability of bee venom. I've never met anyone who was allergic to it, and is it even effective by inhalation?

[zaibatsu]

People who are allergic to bee/wasp stings og into anaphlactic shock don't they? That'd close off your throat (in extreme reaction). A couple of people I know have an allergy to it, and mainly they'd just have to take some anti-histamines after being stung.