Some experts are questioning a Bush administration plan to create a national network of air monitors to detect a biological or chemical weapons attack, Reuters reported today (see GSN, Jan. 22).

“I cannot imagine it would be of any useful purpose in a bioterrorism attack,” said Tara O’Toole, head of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins University.  “The problem is that all of the technologies we now have have a very high false positive rate.  They go off when there is not a biological attack,” she added.

The air monitors, which would be created by adapting existing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality monitoring stations, would use filters that would need to be regularly examined at laboratories operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — an expensive and time-consuming process, O’Toole said. 

“The labs that would do this testing are public health laboratories,” she said.  “That system is already severely underresourced and overstretched,” O’Toole added.

Another potential flaw in the plan is that the monitors would only be able to sample a small amount of air in the immediate area, according to experts. 

“You have got to have them in the right place at the right time,” a U.S. Army expert said (Maggie Fox, Reuters/Planet Ark, Jan. 24).

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