U.S. Navy Uses New Tri-Level System to Find Biowarfare Agents

NEW YORK, New York, September 9, 2003 (ENS) - An Ohio State University professor called to active duty shortly after September 11, 2001, has helped the U.S. Navy develop a system to detect biowarfare agents such as anthrax for use aboard naval vessels.

“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.”

Today, Boehm and his team shared their experience in designing the new protocol at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York City.

Michael Boehm has served 10 years as a U.S. Army Reserve combat field medic with a series of educational and professional appointments before joining Ohio State's faculty in 1996. (Photo courtesy Ohio State University)

The BDRD team trained Navy personnel, and this spring the Navy adopted the new system as standard operating procedure for detecting the presence of biowarfare agents.

Boehm's system consists of three levels of action.

Level 1 – presumptive. Carrying portable handheld devices which look and function like home pregnancy test kits, trained personnel can determine within 15 minutes to an hour whether or not a suspected biowarfare 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, said Boehm. 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.

Aircraft on the flight deck of the USS Nimitz, with some 3,200 crew aboard, following the guided missile cruiser USS Princeton through the Arabian Sea. August 28, 2003. (Photo by Airman Maebel Tinoko courtesy U.S. Navy)

“The problem with biowarfare 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 protocol was designed for oceangoing vessels, the same steps have been taken to determine the presence of biowarfare 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, DC during the anthrax outbreaks following September 11," Boehm said.

Since then Boehm and his colleagues have 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.

The American Chemical Society meeting also heard from Boehm's co-presenters, all with the Naval Medical Research Center’s Biological Defense Research Directorate - Al Mateczun, Darrell Galloway, Robert Bull, Joan Gebhardt, Timothy Stello, and Richard Gotautas.