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

ABSTRACT: To assess whether screening blood donors could provide early warning of a bioterror attack, we combined stochastic models of blood donation and the workings of blood tests with an epidemic model to derive the probability distribution of the time to detect an attack under assumptions favorable to blood donor screening. Comparing the attack detection delay to the incubation times of the most feared bioterror agents shows that even under such optimistic conditions, victims of a bioterror attack would likely exhibit symptoms before the attack was detected through blood donor screening. For example, an attack infecting 100 persons with a noncontagious agent such as Bacillus anthracis would only have a 26% chance of being detected within 25 days; yet, at an assumed additional charge of $10 per t

SUBMITTER: Kaplan EH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3020608 | biostudies-literature | 2003 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature