PROGRAM ON DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSTICS OF OCCUPATIONAL AND SOCIAL POISONING FROM ORGANOPHOSPHORUS COMPOUNDS

The military nerve agents are organophosphorus compounds (OP) that are chemically and toxicologically related to OP insecticides which are commonly used to control insect pests in agriculture,veterinary medicine, public hygiene and domestic pest control. Although military OP nerve agents are relatively more toxic to humans, their insecticide counterparts are in some cases quite toxic to human as well.

Acute poisoning from OP nerve agents leads to obvious signs and symptoms including mortality. However, some effects are difficult to differentiate from health effects caused by other diseases and occupational exposures.

Health-care providers continue to face the challenge of identifying which chemical classes of substances should be taken into account in uncertain cases of poisoning.

What is DEPHOS ?

The Dephos System provides a computerized way of identifying the likely chemical classes of OP nerve agents responsible for acute poisoning.

The database involved consists of two parts:

• Chemical Substances Class which includes the names of a substance-group that causes poisoning;
• Symptoms which is a code name of medical features arranged by functional systems of human organism.

Using a special mathematical algorithm, the Dephos assesses the symptoms the user marks and then points to a likely set of substances responsible for an actual poisoning. The names of substances are located in the list in decreasing order of their significance.

Something which is worthy of note is that the probability that medical features of poisoning will appear from exposure to a certain set of OP nerve agents has been proved and confirmed based upon analysis of the abundant scientific literature and medical documentation data.