9/12/2023 0 Comments Escape simulator laboratoryIf the world takes that warning shot seriously, we can insulate ourselves against the next pandemic, be it naturally occurring or human-made. “Amateur biologists can now accomplish feats that would have been impossible until recently for even the foremost experts in top-of-the-line laboratories,” argued Barry Pavel, a national security policy director at the Atlantic Council, and Atlantic Council co-author Vikram Venkatram.Īvoiding a catastrophe in the coming decades will require us to take the risks of human-caused pandemics far more seriously, by doing everything from changing how we do research to making it harder for people to “print” themselves a copy of a deadly virus.Ĭovid-19 was a warning shot for how fast a pandemic disease can spread around the world, and how ill-equipped we are to protect ourselves from a truly killer virus. To prevent pandemics that could be far worse than Covid-19, the world has to dramatically change our approach to managing global biological risks. Those advances have opened the door to innovations in medicine, but they also present a challenge: Viruses as deadly and disruptive as Covid-19, or potentially much worse, are going to be possible to produce in labs worldwide soon, if not right now. Terrorist groups engaged in biological terrorism - like the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which launched a botched bioattack in Japan in 1993 - have so far largely been unable to improve on anthrax, a naturally occurring pathogen that is deadly to those who inhale it but isn’t contagious and won’t circulate the globe the way a pandemic disease can.īut our ability to engineer viruses has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, thanks in part to the rapidly falling price of DNA sequencing and DNA synthesis technologies. But the Soviets seem to have never finalized anything deadlier than what nature came up with. The Soviet Union had a large program, which is suspected to have led to the accidental release of at least one influenza virus that caused tens of thousands of deaths. Whether you’re evaluating prototype designs of a powered air purifying respirator, comparing the performance of a closed-circuit escape respirator to a certifying standard, or conducting controlled negative pressure testing on respiratory interfaces, we are the lab Respiratory Protective Equipment consumers and manufacturers come to for evaluation tools and performance data.Part of Pandemic-Proof, Future Perfect’s series on the upgrades we can make to prepare for the next pandemic.ĭecades ago, when the world first agreed on the norms and guidelines in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), designing and producing biological weapons was expensive and difficult. With a ventilator and mask design both pending North American regulatory approval, ATOR Medical is rapidly developing life-saving technology. In 2020, in response to the spread of COVID-19, ATOR Labs spunoff ATOR Medical, a company focused on affordable COVID-19 solutions. The most advanced simulator of human respiration made to date, the ABMS is currently helping companies in multiple industries track their products’ performance against global requirements including those from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, OSHA, the European Union, the Federal Aviation Agency, and the International Standards Organization. ![]() In 2018, after years of iterative design and consultation with industry stakeholders, ATOR Labs fielded its flagship product-the Automated Breathing and Metabolic Simulator (ABMS). ![]() The Lab was founded in 2014 to quantify breathing and metabolic performance for global respiratory protective device (RPD) manufacturers, research entities, and program management.
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