The U.S. Department of Defense has just unveiled their latest project at Dugway Proving Ground, a U.S. Army facility in Utah – a $39 million dollar chamber designed for testing the nation’s detection systems against biological agents. The defense systems that will be tested there are for detecting air-born agents like plague, anthrax or ricin.

 

The chamber is called the Whole System Live Agent Test facility, and is large enough to house two complete detection systems for comparison side-by-side. Before the facility was built, detection systems like these had to be tested piece-by-piece. Douglas Anderson, chief of the life sciences division at Dugway’s West Desert System says, “We have never had a chamber large enough to do whole system testing…We can do those tests and safely challenge or expose a real system to agent in the air and see if it will respond.” The chamber is designed to always maintain a negative air pressure so that no harmful agents could ever leak out of the testing facility.

 

At the testing facility, aerosolized particles of an infecting agent will be rushed into the chamber using air pressure that will simulate different types of conditions that these biological agents can appear under. Hopefully then, the systems will respond as they are designed to.

 

The creation of the chamber comes as the result of a 2002 government initiative to fortify the United States’ defense arsenal against a biological threat. The new chamber was officially opened on Fenruary 19^th, and it will do just that.