Bioweapons Sensors Project In New York Meeting With Resistance
January 9, 2008 by national
Filed under Homeland Security News
City officials last month quietly activated some of the nation’s newest generation of early warning sensors to detect a biological attack, turning on a limited number of filing-cabinet-size air filters in sensitive, high-volume areas of Manhattan.
But city officials say their effort to expand the program has run into surprising resistance from the White House, which is not widely deploying the machines.
Five years ago, officials here note, the Bush administration was prodding local authorities to move faster to detect the use of biological weapons and pouring billions into biosecurity-related initiatives. New York’s leaders now say the administration’s enthusiasm and sense of urgency has flagged in its final year in office.
The dispute is partly over whether the new sensors each with a $100,000 price tag are reliable and affordable enough for widespread deployment. But it is also about whether Washington’s early support for such security enhancements has been undermined by distraction and competing budgetary demands.
“We’d like to see a little bit more focus in that area. . . . I think the federal government could do a better job,” New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in an interview this week. He was referring to New York City officials’ desire for more detectors and enhanced capabilities under a federal government program known as BioWatch, under which air samplers were installed in 2003 in more than 30 major U.S. cities to detect the airborne release of biological warfare agents such as anthrax, plague and smallpox.
BioWatch was meant to speed up the response of health authorities in the critical hours before disease could spread and symptoms appeared in people. More than $400 million has been spent so far, but officials in New York and elsewhere say the older air samplers installed under the program do not work as well as intended.
The older samplers catch airborne particles in filters that are manually collected once a day and taken to a laboratory, requiring up to 30 hours to detect a pathogen. They may not preserve live organisms that scientists use to select treatment options. And the process is cost- and labor-intensive, leading to false alarms, quality-control problems and limits on the system’s size, despite an $85 million-a-year national budget.
New York officials say they prefer the newer model activated last month, known as Autonomous Pathogen Detection Systems and developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with federal support. They can automatically sniff the air hourly for a week unattended, identify up to 100 harmful species by using two types of genetic and biochemical reaction tests, preserve live specimens and transmit results immediately to headquarters.
“The whole name of the game with BioWatch is to buy yourself time,” said Richard A. Falkenrath, Kelly’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism and a former Bush White House homeland security aide.
