Detecting Bioterror Attacks by Screening Blood Donors: A Best-Case Analysis

摘要

To assess whether screening blood donors could pro-vide early warning of a bioterror attack, we combined sto-chastic models of blood donation and the workings of bloodtests with an epidemic model to derive the probability distri-bution of the time to detect an attack under assumptionsfavorable to blood donor screening. Comparing the attackdetection delay to the incubation times of the most fearedbioterror agents shows that even under such optimisticconditions, victims of a bioterror attack would likely exhibitsymptoms before the attack was detected through blooddonor screening. For example, an attack infecting 100 per-sons with a noncontagious agent such as Bacillus anthraciswould only have a 26% chance of being detected within 25days; yet, at an assumed additional charge of $10 per test,donor screening would cost $139 million per year.Furthermore, even if screening tests were 99.99% specific,1,390 false-positive results would occur each year.Therefore, screening blood donors for bioterror agentsshould not be used to detect a bioterror attack