Ricin’s Calling Card: Exposure, Ghastly Suffering and Often Welcome Death

AUBURN, Feb. 5, 2004 --- In August 1971, five KGB agents followed Soviet dissident and famed novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (right) into a food store in the Soviet city of Novocherkaask -- a fact later confirmed in the memoirs of Oleg Kalugin, a high-ranking KGB official.  Crowding around the novelist within a tight space, one of the agents pricked Solzhenitsyn with what was intended to be a deadly dose of ricin.

Later that day, still unaware of what had happened, Solzhenitsyn experienced wrenching pain throughout the left side of his body. The pain grew worse with each passing hour.   The following morning the pain was accompanied by huge blisters. It was only the beginning of an almost unbearable agony he would endure for months – pain so intense that he could not even bear a light sheet over his body as he lay in bed. 

Still, he survived.  Georgi Markov (left) wasn’t so lucky.  In September 1978, Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who spoke frequently on Radio Free Europe, was crossing London’s Westminster Bridge when he was passed by a man, later identified as a KGB operative, who apologized for jabbing him with the metal end of his umbrella.  But the jab was intentional.  Three days later, Markov was dead – the victim of a deadly dose of ricin delivered via a pinhead-sized pellet from the end of the umbrella tip.   

This is deadly world of ricin, a substance so effective at inflicting pain that death is often a welcome alternative.

Until now, concerns about ricin have focused primarily on its use in the food or water supply rather than in the mail, where it recently was detected.

Made from the waste of castor beans (pictured right) used in the manufacture of castor oil, ricin affects victims in several ways.

“It all depends on how exposure occurs,” said Dr. Jean Weese, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food scientist and Auburn University associate professor of nutrition and food science.” 

“Once it’s inhaled and lung tissues begin breaking down, you begin losing your ability to breathe. And even if you manage to stop it through an inhalant or don’t inhale enough to kill you, there’s the likely chance it will cause lesions within the lungs that may affect you for years, even decades down the road.  Chemical agents such as ricin can induce carcinogenesis later in life.  So even if you overcome the initial symptoms, there’s the risk of developing cancer later.”

Symptoms associated with the ingestion of ricin include vomiting and diarrhea.  Severe dehydration can follow, along with hallucinations, seizures and blood in the urine.

Skin and eye contact with risin causes redness and severe pain.

The agonizing symptoms associated with ricin poisoning stem from the horrific damage it causes in cells. 

“Ricin produces an enzymatic effect,” Weese said. “It coils like a protein, attaching to the cell and eventually destroying it.  The cell loses its ability to survive, to take oxygen and to do all those other things associated with normal cell function.”

Once the cell is destroyed, ricin continues its deadly trek from one cell to another.

“What makes ricin so frightening and often so deadly is that it can’t be killed like an anthrax spore or E.coli O157:H7, both living organisms, and this explains why there is no antidote to the poison,” Weese said. 

Once contact with ricin has occurred, the challenge is ridding the body of the poison as quickly as possible, usually through intravenous fluids, flushing out the stomach with activated charcoal (in cases where the ricin has been ingested recently) or washing eyes with water if the eyes are irritated.  It takes only 500 micrograms of ricin --- an amount comparable in size to a pinhead – to comprise a lethal dose.

Fortunately for the general public, ricin, despite its deadliness, isn’t considered as effective a killing agent as many biological substances such as anthrax spores.  Unlike ricin, anthrax spores are easily lofted into the air and multiply rapidly in the lungs if inhaled in sufficient numbers.

Even so, it’s one of several naturally occurring, readily available toxins that federal investigators fear could be refined into killing agents.  Two other substances that are being closely monitored are solanine, a substance which is produced by sun exposure in potatoes, and nicotine, which can be lethal in doses exceeding 40 milligrams.

[Source: Dr. Jean Weese, Alabama Cooperative Extension System Food Scientist and Auburn University Associate Professor of Nutrition and Foods, (334) 844-3269; Writer: Jim Langcuster, News and Public Affairs Specialist, (334) 844-5686.]

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