BIOSURVEILLANCE
(left) Area shot of 120 sq km of indoor and outdoor sporting venues, including major foot traffi c corridors and mass gatherings of audiences of more than 18,000. A fl exible, integrated and responsive real-time situational awareness system is essential.
(below) Sampler placement in indoor venues – discretion is a factor in placement to maximise monitoring of airfl ows during events without distraction. Both high- and-low-velocity samplers are used, dependent on operational procedures dictated by the venue.
T
he current approach to mass-gathering biosurveillance relies chiefl y on the establishment of a syndromic
surveillance network in which health professionals provide co-ordinated responses to a central database that monitors outbreaks and propagation of global diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) has pioneered the surveillance network approach, in cooperation with national and international public health agencies, to respond to the challenge of early detection and mitigation of pathogenic outbreaks. As such, the WHO is in the forefront of establishing requirements and identifying shortfalls in syndromic surveillance approaches, and ways in which new technologies and methodologies can be implemented to address these limitations and shortfalls.
Among these issues is the recognition that
enhanced biosurveillance must address a requirement to monitor and collect aerosol
samples from environments at mass gathering sites (both indoor and outdoor), and provide these samples for analysis. Further, such a capability must be designed to be scalable, modular, and applicable to varying risk and threat profi les of events being monitored, as well as budgetary and resource allocations associated with the execution of such events.
Enhanced approach Ideally, the next logical step in expanding the syndromic surveillance capability is to design a means by which the aerosol environment at multiple locations in a mass gathering event could be monitored for aerosolised pathogens (whether man-made or naturally occurring). This would be coupled with a sampling capability to obtain environmental samples for analysis of these samples to identify pathogens for facilitation of appropriate medical and security countermeasures. Dycor Technologies provided such a capability in support of the Public Health
72 | CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL & NUCLEAR WARFARE | 2012/02
Agency of Canada (PHfAC) at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games and the June 2010 G8-G20 Leaders Summit in Toronto, Canada - enhancing PHAC’s biosurveillance and Canadian Security Forces capabilities. Dycor has been involved in the development and implementation of military biological detection and sampling capability since the early 1990s and is active in the transition of these capabilities to new medical and environmental requirements. The PHAC National Response Team Lead and Dycor’s aerobiology subject matter experts were responsible for implementing the biosurveillance monitoring portion of the Canadian Security Forces and International Olympic Committee response plan that required active environmental aerosol monitoring and sampling. This was essential to provide effi cient and timely sample analysis for early warning of prospective pathogens to mitigate the propagation of disease outbreaks, whether
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