Laser-activated shungite carbon was tested as a battlefield treatment for mustard-gas skin burns

The short version

A Russian military-toxicology team tested shungite carbon, activated with a laser, as a first-aid dressing for skin burns from mustard agent (iprit, a chemical-weapon vesicant). It worked well enough to publish: half the treated animals survived a dose meant to be lethal, and the wounds healed in about the same time as the army's standard decontamination kit.

What they did

They started with ordinary Karelian shungite, then treated it with laser light. That nearly doubled its working surface area:

"Поверхность обработанного лазерным излучением шунгита почти в 2 раза превышает поверхность природного шунгита"
"The surface of laser-treated shungite is almost 2 times larger than that of natural shungite" - measured as 18.4 m²/g versus 10.5 m²/g.

The laser treatment also sharpened its ability to pull reactive, damaging particles out of contaminated water:

"Лазерная обработка шунгита повышает его способность очищать загрязнённую воду от радикальных и ион-радикальных частиц"
"Laser processing of shungite increases its ability to clean contaminated water of radical and ion-radical particles" - a 76-fold reduction in liquid, 113-fold in inert gas.

And it was strongly biocidal:

"Активированные наночастицы шунгитового углерода обладают биоцидным действием"
"Activated shungite-carbon nanoparticles possess a biocidal effect" - a 470-fold drop in E. coli.

The burn test

- Agent: mustard gas (iprit), 30 mg/kg applied to the skin
- Shungite dressing: 0.25 g per dm² of skin
- Result: 50% of the rats survived; wounds healed in about 40 days
- The army's standard chemical-decontamination kit (IPP-11) gave 100% survival and 38-day healing

So the shungite preparation landed in the same ballpark as the purpose-built military decontaminant - from a rock. The same team also tested it against phenol, the pesticide carbofos, and the electrophilic compounds in tobacco smoke.

Where the trail leads

The full paper, with the surface-area, radical-removal and survival tables, is open-access in Russian. If you want the lab-grade detail, read it directly - AI can translate it for you in seconds.

Sources

- Zemlyanoy A.V., Onikienko S.B., Radilov A.S., et al. (2016), "Применение углеродсодержащих наноматериалов при поражениях высокотоксичными химическими соединениями", Токсикологический вестник: cyberleninka.ru