Any space, enclosed or open, can be vulnerable to the dispersal of harmful airborne biological agents. Silent and near-invisible, these bioagents can sicken or kill living things before steps can be taken to mitigate the bioagents' effects. Venues where crowds congregate are prime targets for biowarfare strikes engineered by terrorists, but expanses of fields or forests could be victimized by an aerial bioattack. Early warning of suspicious biological aerosols can speed up remedial responses to releases of biological agents; the sooner cleanup and treatment begin, the better the outcome for the sites and people affected.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have developed a highly sensitive and reliable trigger for the U.S. military's early warning system for biological warfare agents.
"The trigger is the key mechanism in a detection system because its continual monitoring of the ambient air in a location picks up the presence of aerosolized particles that may be threat agents," says Shane Tysk, principal investigator of the laboratory's bioaerosol trigger, the Rapid Agent Aerosol Detector (RAAD), and a member of the technical staff in the laboratory's Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group.
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