Distinguished lecture speaker to talk about growing biological threat

Contact: Kay Roybal, k_roybal@lanl.gov, (505) 665-0582

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Jan. 12, 2001 -- Al Zelicoff, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and member of the U.S. Delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention will speak Wednesday at the Physics Building Auditorium as part of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Bioscience Division Distinguished Speaker Series.

The lecture begins at 3:30 p.m. and will be open to the public. His topic will be "Prospects for Monitoring the Biological Weapons Convention and the Growing Biological Threat."

Zelicoff has served as technical adviser for the BWC since 1989 and created the BWC-Web for exchange of information among States parties. He is also actively involved in the Co-operative Measures Program (CMP) with Russian nuclear laboratories and established telecommunications and Internet links with Russian Nuclear Centers. The Internet links have been instrumental in the development of cooperative disease monitoring projects with Russian regional epidemiology units. "Monitoring the emergence of new and infectious diseases is an effective tool for the public health networks for both naturally occurring epidemics or an intentionally introduced one," said Zelicoff. "The response to an influenza pandemic is likely to be chaotic and inadequate. It takes at least six months from the time that a new strain is recognized to produce a new vaccine. As a result, common disease outbreaks such as influenza are only recognized in retrospect in a community, and the opportunity to apply appropriate prophylaxis is often lost.

"Similar problems would likely occur in a terrorist-caused disease outbreak. The presence of a respiratory syndrome would almost certainly go unreported, and would, in addition, likely be dismissed as a viral, community-acquired illness. Only after many people became ill, and suffered symptoms well beyond those of the common cold would there be sufficient suspicion to consider the possibility of terrorist attack."

Zelicoff heads a multi-institutional collaborative project initiated in New Mexico known as the Rapid Syndrome Validation Project. It is a collaboration between Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico Emergency Medicine Department and the NM Department of Health Office of Epidemiology. RSVP was conceived to operate at the intersection of public health and bioterrorism and to provide early warning to emerging threats. It provides the public health system with both a tool to deal with today's threats of emerging diseases and tomorrow's danger of biological agents in the hands of terrorists.

In addition to collaborations on the RSVP project, Los Alamos scientists have been actively involved in efforts to model transmission patterns in diseases such as influenza. Others are working in a variety of areas to counter biological threats, developing technologies that detect and protect the public from the threat of infectious agents.

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