Yulia Skripal, poisoned daughter of Russian spy, discharged from hospital
The poisoned daughter of a former Russian spy has reportedly been discharged from the hospital after
being targeted with a suspected nerve agent, along with her father.
Hospital
officials said early on Tuesday morning that Yulia Skripal, 33, had left the
facility. They said she had recently made a rapid recovery after spending
almost a month unconscious and in critical condition.
A
statement delivered by the medical director of Salisbury district hospital,
Christine Blanshard, said they "wish Yulia well," but added
"this is not the end of her treatment."
"Yulia
has asked for privacy from the media and I want to reiterate that
request," Blanshard said.
Yulia
Skripal and her father Sergei Skripal, 66, were found slumped on a park bench
in the English city of Salisbury on March 4. Blanshard said Sergei Skripal has
also made "excellent" progress and they hoped he would also be
released from the hospital "in due course."
Assessments
by the British government concluded they were attacked with a type of Russian
nerve agent known as Novichok.
Russia
has fiercely denied allegations that it is responsible for the poisonings and
accused the British government of fabricating the attack.
Doctors
at Salisbury district hospital said last week that Yulia Skripal was
"responding well to treatment, improving rapidly and no longer in a critical
condition."
"Our
job in treating the patients has been to stabilize them -- ensuring that the
patients could breathe and that blood could continue to circulate,"
Blanshard said Tuesday morning about the treatments used to save Yulia and her
father. "We then needed to use a variety of different drugs to support the
patients until they could create more enzymes to replace those affected by the
poisoning."
Shortly
after the hospital's announcement, reports said that Yulia may have spoken to
her cousin in Russia by phone.
A
recording that was purported to be of that conversation was aired on Russian
television. During the brief conversation reportedly between the two, Yulia
said she did not think her cousin would be given a visa to enter the U.K. to
visit her.
On
Monday, the Russian RIA news agency reported that Yulia is applying for asylum
in the U.K.
Over
the weekend the British press reported the Skripals may be resettled in one of
the western countries involved in the "five-eyes"
intelligence-sharing community -- the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia or New
Zealand.
Novichok
Novichok (Russian: Новичо́к, "newcomer"/ "newbie")
is a series of nerve agents developed by the Soviet
Union and Russia between
1971 and 1993.[a][2][3] Russian
scientists who developed the agents claim they are the deadliest nerve agents
ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent
than VX,[4][5] and
others up to ten times more potent than soman.[6]
They
were designed as part of a Soviet programme codenamed "FOLIANT".[1][7]Five
Novichok variants are believed to have been adapted for military use.[8]The
most versatile is A-232 (Novichok-5).[9] Novichok
agents have never been used on the battlefield. Theresa
May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and many heads of state,
said that one such agent was used in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia
Skripal in England in March 2018.[10] Novichok
was also confirmed to have been used in the poisoning of a British couple once
again in Wiltshire 4 months later.[11] These
attacks left both pairs in critical condition, and hospitalized first
responders and police officers who responded without the knowledge
the nerve agent was used, making it so they didn't have appropriate protective
equipment. Russia denies producing or researching agents "under the title
novichok".[12]
In
2016, Iranian chemists synthesised five Novichok agents for analysis and
produced detailed mass spectral data which was added to the Organisation
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical
Database.[13][14]Previously
there had been no detailed descriptions of their spectral properties in open scientific
literature.[13][15] A
small amount of agent A-230 was also claimed to have been synthesised in the
Czech Republic in 2017 for the purpose of obtaining analytical data to help
defend against these novel toxic compounds.
Novichok nerve agent
strikes two new victims in the UK
The
nerve agent Novichok has poisoned two new victims in England, TheTelegraph reports. The two
collapsed after visiting Salisbury, the same town where former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter
Yulia were attacked with the chemical weapon back in March.
A
man and a woman in their 40s, identified by The Telegraph as
Charles Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, were rushed to the hospital on Saturday after
they passed out at a home in Amesbury, according to a televised
police statement. A witness told The Telegraph that both were
foaming at the mouth — a sign of nerve-agent poisoning.
At
first, doctors thought contaminated drugs were to blame. But by Monday July
2nd, doctors were concerned enough about the patients’ symptoms that they sent
samples to defense laboratory Porton Down for testing. Those tests revealed
that the couple had been poisoned by Novichok, authorities announced today.
The
term Novichok actually represents a collection of nerve agents developed by the
Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War. Like other nerve agents, they
work by glomming onto an enzyme that’s key for healthy signaling between nerves
and muscles — leading to drooling, seizures, and paralysis. “So, it’s a
horrible way to die,” Peter Chai, a medical toxicologist at
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told The Verge in
March. Novichok agents are also thought to directly damage
nerves, according to a paper Chai recently
published in the journal Toxicology Communications.
That’s
why prompt treatment is so important — and knowing that a nerve agent is to
blame will help. Treatment will likely include drugs to dry out the patients’
secretions and seizure medication. That deals with the immediate symptoms,
while another drug works to pry the nerve agent off that key enzyme. For now,
the patients are still in critical condition, according
to the BBC.
The
good news is that the Skripals have recovered. The bad news is that these new
Novichok cases suggest that there may still be Novichok in Salisbury, despite efforts to decontaminate the area.
Nerve agents don’t just poison people — they stick around and poison the land,
making the attack even scarier. “They’re really oily so they persist in the
environment,” Chai told The
Verge in March. “So the intention is to use them in an area where
people just can’t go into the land anymore, so you’re denying territory.”
We
still don’t know if, or how, the two attacks are connected. But unlike the
Skripals, Rowley and Sturgess probably weren’t the
victims of a targeted attack with the chemical weapon, the BBC reports.
Instead, they may have been poisoned by touching something that became
contaminated with Novichok during the assassination attempt on the
Skripals, Deborah Haynes, the defense editor
for The Times, posted on Twitter.
It’s
a logical hypothesis, tweets Dan Kaszeta, an independent
security consultant and chemical weapons expert: “After all, nerve agents are
indiscriminate weapons and the Novichoks were engineered with persistent
contamination of land and equipment in mind.”
facts about the nerve
agent Novichok
(Reuters)
- Two British citizens are critically ill after they were exposed to the
Novichok nerve agent which struck down a former Russian agent and his daughter
in March, Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer said on Wednesday.
Brief
overview of Novichok:
- First developed in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and
1980s, Novichok, or “newcomer,” is a series of highly toxic nerve agents with a
slightly different chemical composition than the more commonly known VX and
sarin poison gases.
- Novichok agents are believed to be five to 10 times more
lethal, although there are no known previous uses. Moscow is not believed to
have ever declared Novichok or its ingredients to the Hague-based Organisation
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which oversees a treaty banning
their use.
- Novichok, the fourth generation of poison gas, was made with
agrochemicals so that offensive weapons production could more readily be hidden
within a legitimate commercial industry, according to U.S. chemical weapons expert
Amy Smithson.
- Publications about development and testing of Novichok in the
1990s led to U.S. suspicions that the then-USSR had a secret weapons program
and did not declare all it had in its stockpile when it joined the OPCW.
- Russia, along with the United States, once ran one of the
largest chemical weapons programs in the world. It completed the destruction of
a stockpile declared to the OPCW last year. The United States is in the final
stages of destroying its own stockpile.
- Russia was once believed to possess thousands of tonnes of
weaponized Novichok varieties and their precursors, according to a 2014 report
by the U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, a non-partisan group working to
reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
- The chemical “causes a slowing of the heart and restriction of
the airways, leading to death by asphyxiation,” said Professor Gary Stephens, a
pharmacology expert at the University of Reading. “One of the main reasons
these agents are developed is because their component parts are not on the
banned list.”
- The weaponization of any chemical is banned under the 1997
Chemical Weapons Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory.
Reporting by Anthony Deutsch;
Editing by Catherine Evans, Nick Tattersall and Leslie Adler
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