The doggie will see you now

[Guest guest]

The Sunday Times Magazine

May 07, 2006

 

The doggie will see you now

 

Rescuing people from avalanches is old hat. Now, man’s

best friend can diagnose cancer, explain our phobias —

even warn us of terrorist attacks. Report by Charlotte

Hunt-Grubbe

 

 

American security officials were in a state of high

anxiety on Saturday, September 24 last year. Air

sensors placed above Washington, DC, to alert the US

government to biological terrorist attacks had

detected a potentially dangerous bacterium. They

urgently needed to contact accident and emergency

departments to see if unusually high numbers of people

were coming in with symptoms of a pneumonia-like

disease.

 

Officials scrambled for the phones, but they just

couldn’t collate the information from the hundreds of

hospitals in and around the American capital fast

enough. The situation seemed bleak. But help was about

to come from an unlikely source. A thousand kilometres

away, in a laboratory at Purdue University in the

leafy town of West Lafayette, Indiana, the vet and

epidemiologist Dr Larry Glickman received a call from

the Department of Homeland Security. He checked

through his computer database of thousands of

up-to-the-minute medical records. Nothing looked

suspicious, and within minutes he had given the

authorities the all-clear: it was a false alarm, not a

bio-terror threat. But how exactly did he do it?

 

Glickman enjoys teasing the engineers and physicists

on his campus who are hard at work designing new ways

to detect deadly organisms in the environment. “They

are developing the most sophisticated

chemical-detection technology in the world, but mine

beats theirs hands down. It detects bio-terrorist

attacks, emerging infectious diseases, cancer, drugs,

explosives and even helps us find disease-causing

genes. I tell them it’s called the D.O.G. – most of

them don’t understand what I mean.”..

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2155556.html

 

 

Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.