Company profile: Universal Detection Technology (UDT)

In 1994 in Tokyo, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult releases sarin gas at underground stations. Eight people were killed and more than 1,000 required medical attention.

* In the mid-1990s, the FBI investigated several cases of anthrax threats in the United States:

* In 1995 in Arkansas a ricin threat was discovered to be a hoax.

* In 1996 in Dallas, Texas, a disgruntled employee in a large medical laboratory laced pastries with cultures of Shigella. The result was twelve sever cases of dysentery.

* In the 1997 a suspected anthrax attack on the headquarters of B’nai Brith was discovered to be a hoax, but not before traffic in downtown Washington, D.C. was paralyzed for hours.

* In 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, anthrax was sent in the mail to several members of Congress and a couple of news organizations in Florida and New York.

It is thus not surprising that in January 2006 the U.S. State Department counterterrorism coordinator Henry Crumpton said that “I rate the probability of terror groups using weapons of mass destruction as very high. It’s simply a question of time.” Crumpton said a biological attack was potentially the most troubling scenario. He said evidence from Afghanistan suggested al-Qaeda had been seeking to develop anthrax before the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001. “It is not the nuclear threat that bothers me,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “I think, if anything, the biological threat is going to grow. As catastrophic as a nuclear attack would be, it would be self-contained. But if you look at a worst-case scenario for a biological attack, it would be difficult to determine whether or not it was a terrorist attack, and it would be far more difficult to contain.”

How does a nation prepare itself for a bioterror attack? Los Angeles, California-based Universal Detection Technology (UDT), an anthrax detection specialist, says it agrees with a 2004 Johns Hopkins University study which concluded that early detection, and not pre-exposure vaccination, is the key to limiting an outbreak of anthrax. UDT has licensed a bacterial spore detection technology from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and used it to develop a real-time continuous detection device capable of identifying abnormal levels of bacterial spores in the air, which is signature of a possible anthrax attack.

A 2002 paper by JPL chemist Adrian Ponce and Baylor University microbiology senior Elizabeth Lester (see reference