This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
Are we prepared for biological warfare? Cheap and easy to produce and deploy, bioweapons nonetheless have the capacity to cause widespread disease and death. In wargames of a fictional attack on Oklahoma City, an infectious agent such as smallpox spread to three million people throughout the continental United States within 12 weeks.
Thankfully the world has yet to see full-scale biowarfare. As Christopher Aston, a genomics researcher and adjunct professor at New York University Medical Center, writes in the October issue of IEEE Spectrum, researchers are hard at work developing new kinds of early-warning sensors that can detect an attack in a matter of minutes. Positioned around a battlefield, these portable, battery-operated biodetectors continuously collect and prepare air samples and then automatically feed them through diagnostic tests, using highly specific molecular interactions to look for the bioagents. High-tech versions of the coal-miner's canary, these devices are designed to determine the type and concentration of the agent within minutes, enough time to let soldiers don protective gear.
Contact: Jean Kumagai, 212 419 7551, [email protected].
For faxed copies of the complete article ["Biological Warfare Canaries" by Christopher Aston, IEEE Spectrum, October 2001, pp. 35-40] or to arrange an interview, contact: Desiree Noel, 212 419 7555, [email protected].
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