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| Home Front: Tech |
| Home Front Anti-Terror Tech |
| 2005-04-25 |
| This Wall Street Journal article (reg req) reviews some of the work being done by the Livermore National Lab to assist in protecting us at home. snip (A) biodetector that the lab recently licensed to GE Infrastructure Security, a unit of General Electric, which expects to put it on the market next year with a price tag of about $200,000. Its put-you-to-sleep name--the Autonomous Pathogen Detection System--belies its sophisticated capabilities. Using air samples, APDS tests for 95 separate agents, including anthrax and plague. (The full list is classified.) APDS is considerably more advanced than the biodetection system currently deployed in 30 cities under the federal BioWatch program. The earlier model uses filters that must be picked up and hand-carried to a lab for analysis. APDS, which requires servicing just once a week, continuously collects and analyzes air samples and sends a report back to a central monitoring station every 60 minutes. This reduces the time for detecting a bioagent release to an hour or less--time that could mean the difference between life or death for people in a contaminated area. APDS, which is about the size of a refrigerator you’d see in a college dorm room, has been field-tested in the New York subways, the Washington Metro, and at San Francisco and Albuquerque airports. The underlying technology has gone through a million tests without a single false-positive reading--a degree of reliability that is extremely valuable in real-world situations. As Howard Hall, a nuclear chemist whose office is developing radiation detectors, puts it: A detector "doesn’t do any good if a cop comes to the conclusion that every alarm is false." Christine Hartmann Siantar, who also works in the area of nuclear and radiation countermeasures, talks about other projects in progress. A "nuclear carwash" would screen every cargo container entering the U.S. for nuclear materials. That likely will be field-tested in 2007 by the Customs Service. Also in development is a personal screening test for radiation exposure akin to a home pregnancy test. In the event of an attack, the aim is to ease the burden on health facilities by encouraging unexposed citizens to stay home. Another area of Lab research is "pathomics" or the study of the molecular basis of infectious disease. The objective is to devise a simple blood test that can tell whether someone has been exposed to a disease-causing pathogen before he has begun to develop symptoms. Faster detection, followed by rapid treatment, could save the lives of those exposed to anthrax or other bioagents. This is especially important when considered in light of last month’s Robb-Silverman report, which warns that most of the traditional intelligence-collection tools are "of little or no use in tackling biological weapons." Good work, folks. Thanks. |
| Posted by:Mrs. Davis |
| #1 Cool stuff from Nerds that actually matters. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet 0’ Doom 2005-04-25 2:02:11 PM |