As little as four mg of Sarin per cubic metre for just two minutes would have triggered that physiological response, according to an Apr. 17 email from UK-based American chemical weapons specialist Dan Kaszeta in April. A 2002 article in the journal Critical Care Medicine put the minimum exposure necessary to cause miosis at one mg of Sarin per cubic metre for three minutes.
Yet miosis was the least prevalent symptom among those people claiming to have been very seriously exposed to Sarin in Syria.
Dr. Abbas Faroutan, an Iranian physician who treated Iranian victims of Iraqi nerve gas attacks, noted that the data were "not logical."
Seven of the 36 people identified as victims told investigators they had lost a combined total of 39 members of their immediate families who were killed in buildings they said were either points of impact of the rockets or only 20 metres (64 feet) away. However, only one of the seven exhibited the constriction of pupils and only one reported nausea and vomiting.
Despite the paucity of the most fundamental indicator of exposure to Sarin, 31 of the 36 were found to have a trace of Sarin in their blood samples.
That seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that even exposure to an amount of Sarin too small to cause any symptoms would be detected in the blood using an extremely sensitive method called fluoride reactivation, according to Kaszeta.
The U.N. team found that six of the people who claimed serious exposure to Sarin had no trace of Sarin in their blood at all, indicating that they had in fact experienced no exposure to Sarin at all.
Kaszeta said he had concluded that the people interviewed and evaluated by the UN "didn't have serious exposure" to nerve gas.
The indication that the overwhelming majority in the sample had very little or no exposure to Sarin was particularly significant, because those in the sample had been chosen by local opposition authorities as being among the most serious affected survivors. The data suggest that the Syrian opposition and its external supporters had vastly exaggerated the scope and severity of the attack.
In an apparent reference to the questionable data on symptoms collected on the 36 alleged survivors, Sellstrom told Winfield the investigators "need to be better at differential diagnostics on the intoxication, better medical markers."
Selstrom also expressed doubt about the numbers of victims said to have been treated at local hospitals. The U.N. investigators visited two of the three hospitals in the Damascus suburbs that had treated victims of the attack and had provided figures for the numbers of victims they had treated.
"[T]he figures they provided of people who passed through them was just not possible," said Sellstrom. "It is impossible that they could have turned over the amount of people they claim they did."
Sellstrom did not refer to the total number of victims claimed by hospital administrators, but Mà ©decins Sans Frontià ¨res (MSF) issued a statement Aug. 24 that three hospitals near the area of the attack had reported to MSF that they "received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013". MSF said 355 had died.
Sellstrom repeated his doubts about the total number of victims of Sarin intoxication and the numbers of patients said to have been treated in hospitals in a Mar. 11 interview with the website "Syria in Crisis" affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The head of the Syria investigation had also investigated the use of chemical weapons by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war for the U.N. He had been Chief Inspector for UNSCOM, the U.N. Commission on Iraq's compliance with the ban on weapons of mass destruction, and head of its successor, UNMOVIC.
He has apparently questioned the larger narrative of Syrian government culpability for the attack as well. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after the release of the December U.N. investigation report, Sellstrom said he believes both sides in the Syrian conflict had the "opportunity" and the "capability" to "carry out chemical weapons attacks."
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