Isn't Botox great? If you are not interested in it for the wrinkle cureing properties it is well-loved for, you would really be, for the hours of entertainment iut gives you, to laugh at people who use it. The gossip websites call Nicole Kidman Granny Freeze for how the Oscar-winner appears sometimes to be prone to overindulgence with it. And there is that episode of Will and Grace where Will has a go at Botox treatment at the skin doctor's and comes home with a wrinkle-free, but also expression-free face. Everyone gets angry with him when they don't see an expression on his face for any news they give him. So it is decided; Botox is decidedly harmless, if not great fun. Right? Well, not so fast - not if you look up latest in terrorism news that does the rounds.
See, here is the thing. Search your mind for this - what is the deadliest poison that you have ever heard of? Some would say Cyanide, and that would not be far from the truth. But the real king of the hill in Poisonville, is your humble Botulinum - the pure form substance obtained from Botulism bacteria that is diluted and completely watered down to make your favorite Botox vial. Exactly how lethal is this Botulinum thing though? Just for perspective, a mere speck of dust of the Botulinum poison, could slay a man the build of Mike Tyson. A fifth of an ounce, or a gram of the substance could kill a thousand men right away. If one had to make this much at home, it would take no more than a chemist with a master's degree and a couple of thousand dollars or less of chemist's equipment. But why would one do that anyway? Botulinum is churned out at factories all over the world for use in Botox. It would just take one corrupt person at any one of those factories, to sell a quantity to someone with the wrong idea, say, a terrorist. Terrorism news out recently, feels things are going to get even worse. Since Botox sells at $400 a vial, terrorist groups could easily start a legitimate factory for Botilinum, and make an honest (if extravagant) profit selling Botox; and when they want to plan a chemical warfare attack, they would just have to appropriate some of it, from their own factories, for their plans. Regular people buying Botox from them would be paying high prices to run the very factories that would produce the poison to kill them.
Botulinum is produced by the same bacteria that give you botulism, or food poisoning. At one time, these bacteria were very hard to come by. But countries like Russia and Iran have always tried to find ways to use these as biological or chemical warfare weapons, loaded into the nose cone of a missile. Today, terrorism news reports say that no terrorist needs to think of anything as fancy as a missile. They haven't found any garage manufacturing units for botulinum run by terrorists in the US yet, but in China, they certainly have. And back-alley dermatologists in the US, sometimes make the news for trying to pass off fake Chinese Botox for the real thing. They end up paralyzing or killing their patients. You can't blame the whole Botox culture for making it easier for the terrorists to get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction. Watered down Botox has been in use in traditional for centuries. It is just a sign of the times, that today, nothing is safe anymore.
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