Current Organic Chemistry - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2007

Organic and toxic chemicals may cause death, temporary loss of performance or permanent injury in people and animals. If toxic chemicals, their derivatives and synthetic equivalents and toxins that are produced by living organisms are used for military purposes, all of those chemicals can be classified as chemical warfare agents. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax incident shortly after in the US Read More

Solid phase microextraction (SPME) is a very versatile, convenient and simple technique of sample preparation for chromatographic analysis. SPME finds increasingly wide acceptance in the isolation and enrichment of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and their degradation products in air, water and other liquid samples (e.g. urine), soil, clothing material, etc. for their gas chromatographic (GC) determination. Until now, typical co Read More

Recent events as they relate to the war on terror make it abundantly clear that the rapid detection of chemical warfare nerve agents is essential. While the detection of these agents clearly falls into the purview of the analytical chemist, the importance of the organic chemist in the development of new techniques or approaches remains intact. This review serves to introduce the reader to a number of methods for d Read More

Highly toxic organophosphorus inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase referred as nerve agents are considered to be among the most dangerous chemical warfare agents. The oximes represent very important part of antidotal medical countermeasures. They are used to reactivate the nerve agent-inhibited acetylcholinesterase. Despite long-term research activities, there is no single, broad-spectrum oxime suitable for the ant Read More

The decontamination of chemical warfare agents (CWA) from structures, environmental media, and even personnel has become an area of particular interest in recent years due to increased homeland security concerns. In addition to terrorist attacks, scenarios such as accidental releases of CWA from U.S. stockpile sites or from historic, buried munitions are also subjects for response planning. To facilitate rapid id Read More

Many effective strategies have been developed in order to inhibit the hydrodechlorination in the selective hydrogenation of chloronitrobenzenes to chloroanilines which are important intermediates in the chemistry and industry of dyes, herbicides, pesticides and medicines. However, hydrogenolysis of the carbon-halogen bond as a defect of the hydrogenation process could not be avoided completely over the metal ca Read More