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 ....