What are the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning?
When an individual is exposed to low amounts of a nerve agent (as a gas or aerosol) the initial symptoms are a runny nose, contraction of the pupils, deterioration of visual accommodation, headache, slurred speech, nausea, hallucinations, pronounced chest pains, and an increase in the production of saliva. At higher doses, these symptoms are more pronounced. Coughing and breathing problems also begin to occur. The individual then may begin to go into convulsions possibly progressing to coma or death. At even higher doses, an exposed individual would almost immediately go into convulsions and die from suffocation because of the simultaneous shut-down of the nervous and respiratory systems.
