The Sky-High Price of Sniffing Out Anthrax

In September 2001, the just-destroyed World Trade Center still smoldering, letters containing anthrax spores started showing in the mailrooms of major media companies in New York and . It federal authorities two weeks to identify the bioterrorism attack that ultimately killed five people and sickened 17 . The government’s a long way since , yet it could go farther —if Congress decides if the investment is worth .

Right the Department of Homeland Security uses 600 secret air filters detect lethal pathogens. Local health officials in roughly 30 cities that have the filters must manually retrieve every day and cart them back to labs testing. So if terrorists released something deadly the air, it could about 36 hours depending the time of the attack before the toxin is identified. That would be enough time legions of people to get sick or die before officials could react.

The Obama administration wants upgrade the technology, as BioWatch, to the response time to six hours or less. But there’s a cost: Estimates to buy and maintain the new sensors surged to $5.7 billion—six times the initial price tag. Florida Representative Gus Bilirakis, the Republican chairman of the House subcommittee jurisdiction over BioWatch, asked the Government Accountability Office to analyze the proposed spending. The agency’s report, in August, “will not be considered lightly,” says Bilirakis in an e-mail, “especially given our country’s current fiscal situation.”

The 2,500 new sensors and bio-attack alert system Homeland Security wants to buy Positive ID (PSID), a medical device and biological detection company in Delray Beach, Fla., or Northrop Grumman (NOC), the fifth-largest federal contractor, would be automated. Air sniffers would samples at least four times day, and an internal computer would a DNA test on the particles traces of anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, and other pathogens. The so-called labs-in-a-box would then send the results immediately a secured network to local and federal officials, would verify them and dispatch drugs to hospitals in the of an attack.

Homeland Security has already spent at $30 million trying to develop the new system. It was originally scheduled to live this month, but a series of bureaucratic delays and tech glitches—the agency changed specs; the contractors couldn’t get the DNA testing to work correctly—have held progress.

Now PositiveID and Northrop Grumman say they’ve worked through these problems, Homeland Security wants to bidding on a $3.1 billion contract the labs-in-a-box before October. “I’m hopeful when Congress a look at the situation and where the technology is,” says Dave Tilles, director of Northrop’s homeland-security business unit, “they see this as a good investment for the country.”

Getting that big of a commitment from Capitol Hill may tough in an election year. For the moment, lawmakers working on spending bills that withhold funds for BioWatch. “Is it really going to deliver they have been advertising?” asks Randall Larsen, chief executive officer of the WMD Center, a consulting firm Washington. “It’s real hard to do a return investment because there are a lot of unknowns.”

Homeland Security’s proposed upgrade:
1. Computerized “labs-in-a-box,” such as those by PositiveID (pictured above), can detect deadly pathogens the air.
2. The labs—2,500 of them—would be installed secret, high-traffic locales in some 30 cities, including Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Houston.
3. Automated air sniffers would take samples several a day. An internal computer runs a DNA test, sending results over a secured network local labs.
4. Within six hours each air sampling, officials would know if germs present and if drugs or vaccines are needed at local hospitals.

The line: Homeland Security wants to install bioterror sensors that would sniff deadly germs in six hours or less, from the current 36.


Adapted and abridged from: businessweek.com, June 21, 2012.