Can first responders—police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, etc.—use these rapid diagnostics?
No. They wouldn’t use these devices to detect biological weapons. However, they would use tests for chemical weapons. If there has been a clandestine release from a biological agent and environmental detectors are able to pick it up early enough, then the first people that show signs of having been exposed will show up either in an emergency room or at the office of their primary care provider. Hospital personnel and other medical staff should be provided with the rapid diagnostics, rather than first responders. How, then, would diagnostics for biological agents be used in the field? A clandestine release will become known because it will be picked up on an environmental detector. The area in which the release occurred can then be defined, and sampling and testing can be performed on people that might have been within the plume. But the question is: At what point do they develop recognizable and detectable symptoms? For example, if someone released smallpox today and we picked it up on
