AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Priorities and Implications for Aerosol Research in Biological Hazard Assessments
MATTHEW MOE, Morgan Minyard, Department of Homeland Security
Abstract Number: 480 Working Group: Environmental Fate of Infectious Aerosols
Abstract The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) have unique but similar missions. DHS supports risk-based decision making across the United States Government on response and recovery from Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear (CBRN) incidents. DTRA’s main mission is to protect the warfighter by providing better understanding of potential threats that can inform decision making and countermeasures. Both DHS and DTRA produce assessments that combine the best available information on threat agent properties with other inputs to model the consequences of myriad plausible scenarios. Critical to many of these assessments is a prediction of the downwind plume and associated residual hazards of a biological release. While some aspects of plume modeling are well understood (e.g., the impact of particle size on transport and deposition), other factors are much less clear (e.g., the influence of particle size on pathogenesis or environmental factors on agent fate and particle size). Therefore, both DHS and DTRA support research to provide a better understanding of and develop data to support hazard modeling efforts for CBRN incidents of concern. This presentation will focus on the current needs and priorities of the DHS biological hazard assessment program and DTRA’s threat agent science bioaerosol program, discussing how the programs inform hazard predictions associated with a biological release.