On March 20, 1995 the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked the Tokyo Subway with Sarin, a chemical warfare nerve agent, killing a dozen people, severely injuring fifty, producing exposure symptoms for 1,000 and sending over 5,000 people to Tokyo hospitals. At that time there was no clinical assessment to determine who had been exposed and who had not, nor the extent of exposure among the exposed population. If a similar attack was perpetrated in any US city how would the public health infrastructure respond? The current state of readiness is a result of; improvements in clinical chemical analysis techniques using mass spectrometry, implementation of rapid parallel processing sample handling equipment, the creation of an effective laboratory network of public health laboratories, and the integration of this network into a national response strategy. The shifting of the analytical paradigm has resulted in an effective laboratory response to a mass exposure incident.
Learning Objectives:
1. How the LRN responds to a chemical exposure emergency
2. How advancements in mass spectrometry improve clinical response times and analytical throughput
3. How advancements in sample preparation improve response times and analytical throughput
|
|
