Dr. Tara O'Toole, the department's undersecretary for science and technology, doubts that the so-called Generation 3 version of BioWatch could be relied on to detect anthrax, smallpox, plague or other deadly germs in the event of a biological attack, scientists familiar with the matter said.
In this study, a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay was developed to rapidly detect and diagnose duck plague virus (DPV) in both farmed and wild waterfowl, and compared with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method and real-time PCR method in accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.
"After such a long time — nearly 1,500 years, one is still able to detect the agent of plague by modern molecular methods," researcher Holger Scholz, a molecular microbiologist at the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Munich, Germany, told LiveScience.
In an early form of surveillance, in approximately 1348, the Venetian Republic appointed guardians of public health to detect and exclude ships that carried plague-infected passengers.
White blood cells tailored for plague bacteria were able to detect as few as 50 bacteria within three minutes with a false positive rate of 0.4percentt.
Since then, BioWatch air samplers have been installed inconspicuously at street level and atop buildings in cities across the country — ready, in theory, to detect pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases.
The researchers said they had already developed cells that can detect a dozen different pathogens, including smallpox, anthrax, plague and equine encephalitis.
Using pooled sequence data from 100 HapMap samples we have shown that this approach minimizes false positives, while being sensitive enough to detect even low frequency alleles, a problem that has plagued previous pooling and sequencing strategies.
There, the DNA is being scanned with a new microarray that can detect DNA from 3000 different pathogens, including the microbes that cause plague, TB, malaria, syphilis, Lyme disease, and cholera.
