Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON ð— A device for rapidly detecting biological terrorism agents that is both fast and inexpensive could take six years or more to develop, two U.S. government technology experts said yesterday.

The current device widely used by U.S. federal authorities — at the 2002 Winter Olympics, other sporting events and increasingly in major cities through a government initiative — is called the Biological Aerosol Sentry Information System (see GSN, Feb. 21). About the size of a speaker’s podium, it is designed to detect a release of a biological agent and have it analyzed and confirmed at a separate location within several hours.

The system provides U.S. authorities with a “detect-to-treat” capability — informing them after an attack has begun.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, is beginning to focus seriously on developing a “detect-to-warn” capability, said Elizabeth George of the U.S. Homeland Security Department’s science and technology program. Speaking at Harvard University’s Biosecurity 2003 conference here, she estimated that such a system could be developed in “perhaps a six-year time frame.”

Another U.S. official offered a similar assessment. Patrick Fitch, a program leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said he was a “little less optimistic,” but said a usable detect-to-warn device might be possible by the end of the decade.

The challenge, he said, is to develop a device that is small, fast and cheap, so it could be made widely available and easily transportable. Ideally, each unit would cost less than $10,000 and give an accurate reading in less than two minutes, he said. A mass spectrometer system currently costs about $100,000, he said.

Shortening the time needed to detect biological agents could save many lives, George said.

“If we wait until people start presenting with illness, it’s too late, we’ve lost a lot of lives,” George said.

The estimated treatment periods for smallpox, anthrax and plague are significantly less than their incubation periods — meaning that by the time full symptoms show it may be too late to find all the people who were exposed and prevent fatalities. Some agents, moreover, such as Ebola, currently are basically untreatable.

Fitch said existing technology can already detect agents rapidly, but more time is needed to confirm the accuracy of the detection and to identify the detected agent. A significant difficulty is in discriminating dangerous biological agents from materials naturally occurring in nature, he said.

“The closest thing to that now are optical detectors,” he said, but added that they have trouble accurately distinguishing weapons agents from peaceful substances.

“We can’t afford false positives. If an alarm goes off during the Superbowl and we have to clear everybody out. Those people won’t be very happy about it,” he said.