By Jacob Molyneux, AJN senior editor

You’re working in the ED of a 300-bed metropolitan hospital one Sunday morning when you receive a radio transmission from a paramedic whose ambulance is en route with a casualty of a suspected nerve gas attack. The paramedic reports that two additional ambulances are also on the way. Nerve gas? You’re stunned. What should you do first?

quinn.anya/via flickr creative commons

That’s the start of our 2002 article (free for a month, until October 5) about chemical attacks and their aftermath. Such an event is not an impossibility here in the U.S. Remember the 1995 attacks in Japan, in which sarin gas was released at several points on the Tokyo subways by members of a radical cult, killing 12 and injuring thousands? And there is now convincing evidence (not to mention horrific photos of the many children killed) that the Syrian government used nerve gas on its own people last week despite widespread prohibitions against its use. In fact, USA Today reported that a number of the nurses and physicians who treated the victims of the gas attack may have subsequently died themselves from exposure to the patients’ clothing and skin.

Our 2002 article describes how nerve gas works on the body, the […]