use of non pathogenic biological agents as biological warfare simulants for the development of a stand off detection system

Development of new technologies for Biological Warfare Agents (BWA) stand-off detection implies several safeties, logistic and economic drawbacks that involve production of different highly virulent bacteria and viruses, their isolation and characterization under adequate bio-containment and sample preparation for each agent to evaluate the testing method. In order to overcome these difficulties most of the research activities and tests reported so far, are performed using simulants: Biological Agents (BA) which are phylogenetically or structurally related to BWA. The use of the simulants (BWA-S) show, however, some limitations: they can share some of the properties of the biological warfare agents but have different antigens, proteome and genome. In this work, different BWA-S was evaluated for the application in the development and training of stand-off detection systems. This study is the basis for the use of simulants in the development of an Ultraviolet Laser Induced Fluorescence (UV-LIF) based detection systems

The free license codes as decision support system (DSS) for the emergency planning to simulate radioactive releases in case of accidents in the new generation energy plants

The radiological risk is related to a wide range of activities, beginning with the medical and military ones and including those connected to the industrial and research activities such as nuclear fusion. A valid tool to predict the consequences of the accidents and reduce the risk is represented by computing systems that allow modeling the evolution of a possible release of radioactive materials over time and space. In addition to proprietary codes there are free license codes, like Hot-Spot, that allow providing a set of tools to simulate diffusion in case of accidents involving radioactive materials and analyze the safety and security of the facilities in which the radioactive material is manipulated. The case studies scenario’s consists in two simulations accidents scenario the first to biomass plant and the second at nuclear fission plant. The simulation of the radioactive contamination have been conducted with the code HOT SPOT, a free license code. The results of the simulation and data discussion will be presented in this work by the authors

Increasing risk of breakthrough COVID-19 in outbreaks with high attack rates in European long-term care facilities, July to October 2021

We collected data from 10 EU/EEA countries on 240 COVID-19 outbreaks occurring from July-October 2021 in long-term care facilities with high vaccination coverage. Among 17,268 residents, 3,832 (22.2%) COVID-19 cases were reported. Median attack rate was 18.9% (country range: 2.8-52.4%), 17.4% of cases were hospitalised, 10.2% died. In fully vaccinated residents, adjusted relative risk for COVID-19 increased with outbreak attack rate. Findings highlight the importance of early outbreak detection and rapid containment through effective infection prevention and control measures.S

Design and implementation of a biological warfare agents simulant spectral database for the automatic discrimination in unconventional scenarios

The biological agents (BAs) can exist in the form of aerosolized bacteria, fungi or viruses, and they also may be spread by vectors and other routes like water and air supply (Cenciarelli et al., 2013; Kumar et al., 2013). Among the ways which allow the propagation of BAs, certainly air has a more rapid rate of diffusion; for this reason it is important to develop systems for remote sensing of airborne biological agents. Jonsson et al. (2005) successfully present a detection system for BAs based on spectral detection of ultraviolet (UV) laser induced fluorescence (LIF); spectral characterization was also illustrated for some simulants. The most common fluorophores found in bioaerosols are phenylalanine, tyrosine, tryptophan, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide compounds (NADH), flavins and chlorophylls. Among these main fluorophores in bioaerosols, phenylalanine has little absorption above 270 nm, while chlorophylls adsorb around 430 nm. Excitation around 260-290 nm will mainly generate fluorescence emission from tyrosine, tryptophan, NADH, and flavin, while excitation around 350-410 nm will mainly produce fluorescence emission from NADH and flavin. Although in the literature several studies regarding the ability to discriminate BAs through methods that exploit fluorescence excitation through ultraviolet radiation were presented, it appears to be essential to build and implement a database being able to return a response about the kind of BA detected according to a revealed fluorescence spectrum. Furthermore, in order to refine the experimental procedures, it appears essential to standardize the samples preparation methods. This represents the starting point for the creation of a pitched instrument. This PhD research activity aims to design a biological warfare agents (BWA) spectral database using biological agents simulants (BWA-S) for the automatic discrimination in unconventional scenarios, i.e. by standardizing the experimental procedures (e.g. best samples preparation) and setting the better criteria for the algorithm analysis. The PhD in Industrial Engineering - Final Dissertation - Orlando Cenciarelli DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGENTS SIMULANT SPECTRAL DATABASE FOR THE AUTOMATIC DISCRIMINATION IN UNCONVENTIONAL SCENARIOS 3 automatic classification system is based on a novel adaptative algorithm, named as Universal Multi-Event Locator (UMEL). UMEL is a universal technique based on Support Vector Regression (SVR), a version of Support Vector Machines (SVM) for function estimation (Carestia et al., 2014). SVR fits the training data discarding factors such as sampling rate or noise distribution. This technique computes a fitting function and, in addition, retrieves a list of points from the training set. These points become Support Vectors (SVs). For the first time, UMEL is used in this work to discriminate between fluorescence spectral signature of BWA-S

Use of Non-Pathogenic Biological Agents as Biological Warfare Simulants for the Development of a Stand-Off Detection System

Development of new technologies for Biological Warfare Agents (BWA) stand-off detection implies several safeties, logistic and economic drawbacks that involve production of different highly virulent bacteria and viruses, their isolation and characterization under adequate bio-containment and sample preparation for each agent to evaluate the testing method. In order to overcome these difficulties most of the research activities and tests reported so far, are performed using simulants: Biological Agents (BA) which are phylogenetically or structurally related to BWA. The use of the simulants (BWA-S) show, however, some limitations: they can share some of the properties of the biological warfare agents but have different antigens, proteome and genome. In this work, different BWA-S was evaluated for the application in the development and training of stand-off detection systems. This study is the basis for the use of simulants in the development of an Ultraviolet Laser Induced Fluorescence (UV-LIF) based detection systems

Biosecurity Threat Posed by Botulinum Toxin

The deliberate release of biological agents with terrorist or criminal intent continues to pose concerns in the current geopolitical situation. Therefore, attention is still needed to ensure preparedness against the potential use of pathogens as unconventional weapons. Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) is one such biological threat, characterized by an extremely low lethal dose, high morbidity and mortality when appropriately disseminated, and the capacity to cause panic and social disruption. This paper addresses the risks of a potential release of the botulinum neurotoxin and summarizes the relevant aspects of the threat

Biological Dual-Use Research and Synthetic Biology of Yeast

In recent years, the publication of the studies on the transmissibility in mammals of the H5N1 influenza virus and synthetic genomes has triggered heated and concerned debate within the community of scientists on biological dual-use research; these papers have raised the awareness that, in some cases, fundamental research could be directed to harmful experiments, with the purpose of developing a weapon that could be used by a bioterrorist. Here is presented an overview regarding the dual-use concept and its related international agreements which underlines the work of the Australia Group (AG) Export Control Regime. It is hoped that the principles and activities of the AG, that focuses on export control of chemical and biological dual-use materials, will spread and become well known to academic researchers in different countries, as they exchange biological materials (i.e. plasmids, strains, antibodies, nucleic acids) and scientific papers. To this extent, and with the aim of drawing the attention of the scientific community that works with yeast to the so called Dual-Use Research of Concern, this article reports case studies on biological dual-use research and discusses a synthetic biology applied to the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, namely the construction of the first eukaryotic synthetic chromosome of yeast and the use of yeast cells as a factory to produce opiates. Since this organism is considered harmless and is not included in any list of biological agents, yeast researchers should take simple actions in the future to avoid the sharing of strains and advanced technology with suspicious individuals

Towards the implementation of a spectral data base for the detection of biological warfare agents

The deliberate use of biological warfare agents (BWA) and other pathogens can jeopardize the safety of population, fauna and flora, and represents a concrete concern from the military and civil perspective. At present, the only commercially available tools for fast warning of a biological attack can perform point detection and require active or passive sampling collection. The development of a stand-off detection system would be extremely valuable to minimize the risk and the possible consequences of the release of biological aerosols in the atmosphere. Biological samples can be analyzed by means of several optical techniques, covering a broad region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Strong evidence proved that the informative content of fluorescence spectra could provide good preliminary discrimination among those agents and it can also be obtained through stand-off measurements. Such a system necessitates a database and a mathematical method for the discrimination of the spectral signatures. In this work, we collected fluorescence emission spectra of the main BWA simulants, to implement a spectral signature database and apply the Universal Multi Event Locator (UMEL) statistical method. Our preliminary analysis, conducted in laboratory conditions with a standard UV lamp source, considers the main experimental setups influencing the fluorescence signature of some of the most commonly used BWA simulants. Our work represents a first step towards the implementation of a spectral database and a laser-based biological stand-off detection and identification technique

Simulation of caesium-137 (137Cs) local diffusion as a consequence of the Chernobyl accident using hotspot

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986 is considered as the most severe event that has ever occurred in the nuclear power industry, due to the considerable amounts of radioactive material released into the environment. The main purpose of this work is to simulate the dynamics of the local diffusion of caesium-137 (137Cs) in the area strictly close to the Chernobyl reactor. Among the released radionuclides, we selected 137Cs as it was responsible for most of the radiation exposure received by the general population. In order to simulate its local dispersion, HotSpot was used, being a user friendly freeware, and allowing to obtain data in terms of total effective dose equivalent (TEDE) and ground deposition. Two scenarios were simulated (General Fire and General Explosion) using boundary conditions selected from literature data. The obtained output data for the ground depositions were compared with the real ones, demonstrating that HotSpot allows for the simulation of radionuclide local release and diffusion due to the Chernobyl accident, even if only at a low scale. In fact, the relative proportions for the ground depositions values were respected and the measured TEDE values were in good agreement with the literature data