System detects biowarfare agents on Navy ships

By HOLLY WAGNER, Research Communications

An Ohio State professor is part of a team that developed a new protocol that the U.S. Navy now uses to detect biowarfare (BW) agents, such as anthrax, aboard its ships.

"Until mid-2002, the only equipment to detect biological agents that warships had were the sailors themselves," said Michael Boehm, an associate professor of plant pathology at Ohio State and a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve. "The military was ill-prepared to deal with what might happen if a 37-cent letter filled with anthrax or smallpox was opened on a ship at sea."

Michael Boehm     By Kevin Fitzsimons

Boehm was called to active duty shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to help the Navy develop an inclusive biowarfare agent detection program. In late 2001, he headed for the Naval Medical Research Center's Biological Defense Research Directorate (BDRD) in Silver Spring, Md. Boehm's active duty stint ended in February 2003, and he returned to Ohio State.

He and his colleagues at BDRD developed, implemented and trained Navy personnel in how to sample, test and respond to possible biowarfare attacks by agents such as anthrax and smallpox that, this past spring, the Navy adopted as a standard operating procedure for detecting the presence of BW agents. According to Boehm, the plan can be used anywhere there's a suspected BW incident.

Boehm shared his experience in designing the protocol on Sept. 9 at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York City. Co-presenters, all with the BDRD, included Al Mateczun, Darrell Galloway, Robert Bull, Joan Gebhardt, Timothy Stello and Richard Gotautas.

The researchers devised a three-tiered biowarfare agent detection system:

Level 1 - presumptive. Armed with portable hand-held assays, which look and function like home pregnancy test kits, trained personnel can determine within 15 minutes to an hour whether or not a suspected BW agent has infiltrated a ship. Developed in the early 1990s for use in Operation Desert Storm, such test kits give users quick results, but also have their limits, Boehm said.

"While these tests are a good, quick prescreen, the only definitive way to determine if the results of the hand-held test are truly accurate is to grow the organisms in a laboratory," he said.

Level 2 - confirmatory. Before the current testing system was in place, ship-bound Navy personnel had to wait 24 to 96 hours before getting a definitive answer on whether or not a suspected pathogen had infiltrated a ship, Boehm said. Suspicious samples were sent to land-based laboratories for testing. Under the new protocol, several warships have installed air filters connected to machines that run polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays -- tests that provide a genetic fingerprint of a biowarfare agent. These air filters "breathe" nearly 70 times the amount of air a sailor breathes.

"With PCR, we could find a single gene copy amid an ocean of pathogen in less than an hour," Boehm said. This kind of quick detection helps medical personnel know how to treat people who were exposed to the pathogen, ideally before those people have a chance to infect others.

Level 3 - definitive. The suspected specimen is sent to BDRD or another national laboratory, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the U.S. Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases for a full analysis.

"The problem with BW agents is that they come in a variety of forms, such as bacteria, toxins and viruses," Boehm said. "Several of the biggest threats -- anthrax and plague -- are bacteria and can be grown in a laboratory. But viruses like smallpox can only be grown in special conditions. Toxins can't be cultured."

While the three-tiered protocol was designed for seafaring ships, the same steps can be -- and have been -- taken to determine the presence of BW agents in buildings and other enclosed structures.

"BDRD used these three highly complementary approaches for detecting biowarfare agents to process more than 16,000 environmental samples collected from key points within Washington, D.C., during the anthrax outbreaks following Sept. 11," Boehm said. Since then he and his colleagues also trained personnel from more than 30 Naval units to conduct confirmatory analyses.

The next step, Boehm said, is to develop a similar detection system for agriculture.

"The kind of system that we put in place for the Navy doesn't exist for training people to detect plant and animal pathogens," Boehm said.

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Study links early puberty, delinquency in girls

Girls who go through puberty earlier than their peers are more likely to be involved in delinquency, but not for the reasons often suspected, according to a new study. Researchers had long speculated that early-developing girls were nudged into delinquency because they had more older friends, and more male friends. But, instead, new research suggests that the key factors appear to be the fact that these girls are dating and that they have more friends -- regardless of age -- who are already involved in delinquency.

"Girls who develop early aren't any more likely to have male school friends, or older school friends than their less- developed counterparts," said Dana Haynie, author of the study and assistant professor of sociology. "But going through puberty early does expose these girls to other social factors that put them at risk for delinquency."

The study found that girls who were highly developed compared to their peers had a 27 percent increase in minor delinquency -- such as shoplifting and vandalism -- compared to those with average development. Moreover, girls who were less developed than average showed lower levels of delinquency than those experiencing average pubertal development, the study showed.

www.osu.edu/researchnews/archive/earlypub.htm