Narrator: This is Science Today. When it comes to improving biological counter terrorism efforts, the principal issues are to respond to an event quickly – whether with antibiotics or antivirals.

Fitch: The efficacy of doing that rolls off very fast with time and so antibiotics against the bacterium that causes the plague have to be administered roughly a day after people are exposed or develop symptoms. That’s not a lot of time, especially if you’re looking at someone who’s deliberately trying to make people sick because you could be dealing with thousands of people at a time, which is not at all like a typical outbreak.

Narrator: Pat Fitch manages the Chemical and Biological National Security Program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Fitch: And so we’ve put a lot of energy and so have the federal sponsors, into ways to shorten that time, how long before we know we have an event that we need to be responding to and what can we do in response.

Narrator: Fitch adds that the technologies developed at the Lab to counter chemical and bioterrorism are also useful to counter infectious diseases like SARS. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.