The suspicious package they intercepted last year, en route from Japan to a private address in the US, contained several vials packed with a white crystalline powder. It took a while for forensic scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to identify a sample, and what they found was alarming. Gram for gram, TTX is 10,000 times more lethal than cyanide. Its potency is well known in East Asia, where it regularly kills diners who have braved the capricious delic acy known as fugu, or pufferfish. This neurotoxin has a terrifying modus operandi-25 minutes after exposure it begins to paralyse its victims, leaving the brain fully aware of what's happening.
Death usually results, within hours, from suffocation or heart failure.
There is no antidote. But if luckless patients can hang on for 24 hours, they usually recover without further complications. It is this strange return from the dead that some believe gives birth to Haitian zombies. The Livermore team estimated that to extract the 90 milligrams of TTX discovered by the Feds, you'd need between 45 and 90 kilograms of pufferfish livers and ovaries-the animal's most deadly tissues. No one knows what use its intended recipient had in mind.