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Related Experiment Videos

Detecting bioterror attacks by screening blood donors: a best-case analysis.

Edward H Kaplan1

  • 1Yale School of Management and Yale Medical School, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. edward.kaplan@yale.edu

Emerging Infectious Diseases
|September 12, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Screening blood donors is unlikely to detect bioterror attacks early. Even with favorable conditions, symptoms appear before detection, making it an inefficient and costly strategy.

Area of Science:

  • Epidemiology
  • Biosecurity
  • Public Health

Background:

  • Bioterrorism poses a significant public health threat.
  • Early detection of bioterror attacks is crucial for effective response.
  • Blood donor screening is a potential, though unproven, method for early detection.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To evaluate the efficacy of blood donor screening for early bioterror attack detection.
  • To model the time to detection versus incubation periods of bioterror agents.
  • To assess the cost-effectiveness and accuracy of blood donor screening for biosecurity.

Main Methods:

  • Combined stochastic models of blood donation and blood test performance.
  • Integrated epidemic models to simulate bioterror attack scenarios.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Calculated probability distributions for attack detection time.
  • Analyzed detection delays against known incubation periods of bioterror agents.

    • Main Results:

    • Even under optimistic assumptions, bioterror attack victims likely show symptoms before detection via blood donor screening.
    • An attack infecting 100 individuals with Bacillus anthracis had only a 26% chance of detection within 25 days.
    • Annual screening costs were estimated at $139 million with a $10 per-test charge.
    • High specificity (99.99%) still resulted in 1,390 false positives annually.

    Conclusions:

    • Blood donor screening is not a reliable method for early bioterror attack detection.
    • The delay in detection outweighs the benefits, even for non-contagious agents.
    • The high cost and false-positive rates further undermine its utility for biosecurity.