Detecting bioterror attacks
About 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in the thirty largest cities in the United States; the government has deployed a secret system of biosensors to detect bioterror attacks; the location of the sensors, and the pathogens they search for, are kept secret so terrorists would not be able to tamper with the sensors or evade them (officially, even the list of cities where the system is deployed is kept secret)
The Berkeley Lab in Livermore, California, one of the premier cold war-era research centers of the U.S. government, has researchers working on protect city dwellers from exposure to anthrax and smallpox.
The AP reports that lab researchers have created a pathogen early-warning system named Biowatch, which relies on special detectors deployed in thirty U.S. cities – sensors that can identify pathogens by sniffing the air and then alert authorities before people start becoming sick, the article said.
The AP notes that the U.S. government is keeping the location of the biosensors secret so that terrorists would not be able to evade them or tamper with them. The government also is jot saying what pathogens the sensors search for – even the list of thirty cities that have the sensors deployed is secret. The government does let it be known that about 80- percent of the U.S. population is covered by the biosensors, so we can assume that the thirty largest cities now have them.
The biosensor system’s task is daunting. “We have to be able to make millions of measurements and never have a single false positive measurement,” David Rakestraw, manager of the lab’s weapons of mass destruction countermeasures program, told AP. There is no choice, however. “It’s very clear that there’s a trend toward more and more people having capabilities and more and more people having the knowledge to do these things,” Rakestraw said. “I think we need to be prepared.”
