BioWatch - Sniffing out Anthrax in US Cities

Mr Slezak helped pioneer the genetic analysis of biological agents at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Today, eight years after the anthrax attacks, the system Slezak's research team started, known as BioWatch, is quietly operating in more than 30 cities.

A federally funded, locally run program with an $80 million annual budget, it depends on a network of vacuum pumps that draw surrounding air through filters, sniffing for signs of biological agents.

The pumps' precise locations are secret, but they are in high-traffic destinations such as subway stations and where prevailing winds might carry a toxic plume. Each day, technicians retrieve their filters and carry them to public health laboratories, where scientists test for the genetic fingerprints of a top-secret list of biological threats.

The program has made the USA dramatically better prepared for a biological attack — but it also has vulnerabilities, acknowledges Robert Hooks, a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security Office of Health Affairs who now oversees the program for DHS.

Because the filters are collected as infrequently as once a day, a terrorist could release anthrax, plague or smallpox in a U.S. city and it might take 12 to 36 hours for anyone to find out. If the agent were anthrax, public health officials would have as few as 12 hours to confirm the attack, try to map its scope and dispense antibiotics to thousands, or tens of thousands, of people. Inhaled anthrax is nearly always fatal if people who are exposed to it go 72 hours without treatment, Hooks says.

Given the likelihood of delays, some critics question the need for BioWatch. They say the government's focus should be on a tighter public health surveillance network that could detect any epidemic, not just those that are man-made. Read More ....

9200 uncatalogued pathogens found at US lab!

With three days left in spring cleaning season, a US army lab that works on the world's deadliest pathogens has turned up uncatalogued vials of Ebola, anthrax, plague and other pathogens – 9220 of them to be precise.

The laboratory is the same one where anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins worked before he committed suicide last year. The US government suspects Ivins was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, and studies showed that the anthrax used in the attack was "directly related" to the batch stored at the lab.

The discovery of the uncatalogued vials raises questions about whether anyone would notice if some of the lab's pathogens went missing.

"A small number would be a concern; 9200 ... at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that's deeply worrisome. Unacceptable," Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post.

Officials at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, made news of their find in a press conference on Wednesday.

Most research has been on hold at the laboratory after an inspection at the beginning of the year turned up 20 vials of Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus in a box that was supposed to contain 16. This prompted the laboratory's most recent fit of spring cleaning, during which officials spent four months scouring freezers to compare their contents with a database of about 66,000 vials documented as of February.