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Health officials say the method will cut down the time needed to test substances from three days to six hours.
By LEANORA MINAI, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 23, 2002
In the two months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Florida Department of Health tested nearly 7,000 substances for deadly anthrax spores.
It took at least three to four days to test each specimen.
Now researchers at the University of South Florida say they can cut the testing time to six hours.
In what USF researchers and state health officials call an important breakthrough, lab workers would be able to kill the anthrax spores but still detect the presence of the infectious bacteria.
"Theoretically, if the process is better, you can do more samples in a period of time," said Phil Amuso, director of the state Department of Health regional lab in Tampa. "They made a better way, a faster way."
Andrew Cannons, director for the USF Center for Biological Defense in Tampa, drew the analogy, "If you're trying to skin an alligator, you'd rather do it to a dead one than to a live one."
Dr. Vicki Ann Luna, research associate at the center, made the technique public Wednesday at the annual gathering of the American Society of Microbiology in Utah. The method must be approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before it can be used in labs nationwide.
She and other researchers with the USF Center for Biological Defense were working on the procedure before the Sept. 11 attacks. The center has been financed by the U.S. Department of Defense since October 2000 and conducts research on bioterrorism.
Last fall, letters containing anthrax spores killed five people in Florida, New York, Connecticut and Washington, D.C. Contaminated letters sent to the U.S. Senate closed an office building for months.
Emergency workers in Florida were scrambling, collecting mysterious white powders from homes and businesses.
"We were testing people's unopened mail just because they were afraid," Amuso said. "We had oodles and oodles of things coming into the lab that shouldn't have made it there."
The influx caused a backlog in the state's three labs that test for anthrax and other potential bioterrorism agents.
USF's technique involves preparing the sample -- making it safer -- for testing. If samples are made safer, more labs and workers can analyze the substances in the open.
When a sample like a package or letter comes in, lab technicians must open it inside a biosafety cabinet.
Under the new method, the powder or substance is then put in a vial and taken through a three step test phase.
Scientists first get the dormant spores to sprout. The spores are then broken apart with high frequency sound waves. Finally, the spores are exposed to high heat, which destroys their ability to cause disease.
Throughout the process, the genetic fingerprint is preserved, allowing scientists to determine whether anthrax is indeed present. This is key, because lab workers can then take the samples and work in an open lab, outside of a biosafety cabinet.
At the health department's Tampa lab, one of three labs in the state, 1,302 substances were tested for anthrax in October and November 2001. But the lab has only three biosafety cabinets for anthrax testing.
"What it does is it renders it harmless so when you're working on it, you don't have to worry about becoming infected," Amuso said.
The new technique also would allow Florida's three high-level labs to send the spores to less sophisticated labs for further testing.
USF researchers have discovered a three-step technique that dramatically reduces the time it takes to detect anthrax in powders and on surfaces:
1. Germination -- causes dormant anthrax spores to sprout.
2. Sonication -- breaks up bacterial spores using high frequency sound waves.
3. Autoclaving -- involves exposing the spores to 121-degree heat, destroying the spores' ability to cause the disease. Despite the heat, the germ's genetic material is preserved so that researchers can still identify the anthrax.