Military now faced with watching for enemy bacteria

Credit: Chris Mason. CC BY The U.S. government is working on how to identity, contain and defeat an enemy that is becoming more and more dangerous: bacteria…

The issue, especially for the U.S. military, is to discriminate between harmless and virulent strains.

The new program proposes to develop a technology that “rapidly screens unfamiliar bacteria to establish their pathogenicity and even discover unknown pathogenic traits, necessary first steps for designing effective biosurveillance and countermeasures.”

Paul Sheehan, the program manager for the project, stepped in to comment.

“Trends such as rising global population, changes in the environment, and the growing accessibility of tools for genetic engineering mean that our armed forces are increasingly likely to face new bacterial pathogens, whether they occur naturally or are engineered by adversaries,” he said.

“Our existing biosurveillance strategies don’t work on previously undiscovered bacteria or on bacteria that have been specifically designed to evade detection by current tests. We need new screening tools that can quickly characterize the threat to enable a rapid response.” Read more