Chemical security

Even a little bit of poison is still … poison

When soldiers are exposed to small doses of toxins, their symptoms may be mistaken for common illness. Doctors can miss a key window for delivering early treatment, and military planners may never know that chemical or other hazards were present on the battlefield.

With this in mind, scientists at the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, are developing a more accurate detector.

“Right now we have samplers, not detectors,” said Bruce King, a research chemist at the center. “Our real-time tools are not very specific. They maybe look at just a class of chemicals, so a pesticide would look just like [nerve agent] VX on current wearable sensor technology.”

To get a more precise reading on environmental contaminants, the scientists are looking to combine wearable chemical samplers with multidimensional chromatography, a sophisticated analytic technique that can distinguish the specific chemical signature of a wide range of substances.