Outdoor environment

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Airborne contamination control represents a critical point to assess whether the environment is dangerous not only for sterile products but also for the workers or any people evolving into this environment.

The classical method used for air sampling relies on impaction on agar dishes and the culture of the micro-organisms collected. In outdoor environments the microbial charge is very important and it is very difficult to use such impaction technique as far as the Petri dish will be soon saturated and that certain flora will be inhibited by others during the incubation : the results will be thus difficult to interpretate and not always representative of the controlled environment.

As outdoor environments we can give the example of cooling towers,

often in cause when a crisis of Legionnella occurs. the cooling towers are indeed often charged as far as the water which is exhausted from these installations is often under microaerosol form : the inhalation of such aerosols, charged with Legionella, is the way to contaminate human people.

Nowadays, the norms request a control of the water in terms of Legionella concentration but nothing is requested for the air exhausted even if it is the way the contamination can occur and be disseminated.

The use of the Coriolis for the colling towers monitoring can be very useful in cas of contamination but also in case of routine control.

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Another application example is for pollens and allergens monitoring :

the project MONALISA with financial support of European Commission - LIFE has been testing from 2005 to April 2008 Coriolis® Delta to measure antigenicity / allergenicity of the main pollens and allergens. The technology was compared with the Hirst sampling method, used by the most environmental monitoring networks. It consists in airborne particles impaction on an adhesive strip and observation with optical microscope to quantify pollen grains by their morphology.

This new method offers time-to-time data to assess the rate of allergenicity in air, pollen grains count or spores concentrations. Rate of pollen have been compared to the rate of allergen in the air evaluated by ELISA test thanks to the compatibility with immuno-analyses of the liquid sample obtained with Coriolis®.

Defence

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Biological agents are of great concern especially because many of them are easy to manufacture, transport, and disperse. Due to the time lag between a biological attack and the appearance of the symptoms, biological weapons could be devastating. Many diseases caused by biological agents (except toxins) are highly contagious, and during this time lag, infected persons continue to spread the disease, further increasing its reach.

Additionally, difficulties in detecting bioagents make the situation worse. Hundreds or even thousands of people could become sick or die if a biological attack occurred in a major metropolitan area, apart from population panic movements resulting.

Early warning, detection, or recognition of biological aerosolized weapons attacks (the most serious risk), are essential components of biodefence, helping to get an adapted response to mitigate their consequences. The main steps in the detection of the biological threat are:

• the alert which gives a first level of information – ‘there is a potential danger’
• the collection which yields a sample
• the identification of the agent in order to propose the right countermeasures

Bertin Technologies have associated its efforts with partners to propose state-of-the-art solutions for each one of these steps.