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An article in the paper last week described a new explosives detection machine that they were testing out at the local air. It blows puffs of air at you as you walk through it and it's supposed to be sensitive enough to pick up trace chemicals left over from your adventures in bombmaking. It occurred
to me that if the machine was this sensitive they might also be able to upgrade it so it can pick up trace amounts of pathogens, giving us a chance to stop the next pandemic (think SARS). The analysis wouldn't have to be instantaneous either. It would be useful if it could just complete the lab work before the plane landed, giving us a chance to isolate the passengers if any dangerous pathogens were found (say about an hour or so).
Current state of the art
http://www.ge.com/i...ntryscan/index.html
[longshot9999, Apr 21 2005]
Virus detector detects single particle
http://www.indolink...fr020904-074024.php
Expect it to go into production 2008-2011. [st3f, Apr 22 2005]
Purdue University, 2004
http://www.7ms.com/...e/issue/scan08.html
Single particle filament. [st3f, Apr 22 2005]
2002. Patent awarded for size-based 'potential virus' detector
http://www.rdecom.a...dex.htm#ecbc_patent
[st3f, Apr 22 2005]
Short name, e.g., Bob's Coffee
Destination URL.
E.g., http://www.coffee.com/
Description (displayed with the short name and URL.)
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See link for the most recent implementation of this technology. |
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Sounds like a great idea to me. [+] |
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I wonder how one of these machines might react to someone who just cooked some meth. |
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Don't dogs excel at this sort of thing? |
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<obligatory misreading> That's another breakfast cereal I won't be buying </om> |
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I remember seeing this machine (the one on [longshot]'s link) on "Tomorrow's World" about ten years ago. As it never appeared in airports I figured it may have been a hoax so it's nice to know it's real and looking for a buyer. |
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The trouble is that viruses are much
larger (and therefore more complex)
molecules than chemical explosives.
(TNT has a mass of a little over 200
daltons, wheras your average virus will
weigh in at 50+ kilodaltons). |
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That's not to say it's impossible, just
more difficult. The key is in finding a
small part of the virus that is uniquely
identifiable. I'm guessing that you've
probably hit on a subject area that is
getting some heavy research; the
reason why we haven't seen these
things is that they're not yet possible
rather than that nobody has thought of
them. |
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[googles to see if there's any research
published on the internet]. |
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Overjoyed at the use of that oft-neglected unit of measurement - the dalton. |
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Instead of trying to identify individuals
when boarding, why not monitor the air
in the cabin during the flight? It is
partly recirculated and (allegedly)
accumulates all kinds of passenger-
exuded pathogens during the
flight.
So, run part of the
cabin air through an adsorbent
cartridge for the first few hours of the
flight, then elute from the cartridge and
run a PCR or rtPCR for likely
viruses.
You wouldn't
pinpoint the individual passenger, but
in any case they'd be likely to have
infected other passengers during the
flight, so the whole lot would want
isolating upon landing. Plus, you
would be collecting much larger and
more concentrated sample. |
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