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Be prepared. William Bicknell, a professor of international health at the School of Public Health, believes in preventive medicine. Calling for public debate of the current plan of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for response to a terrorist smallpox attack, he proposes a voluntary preexposure vaccination program as a more effective alternative.

Smallpox is a particularly virulent disease -- it is easily spread from person to person, there is no treatment, and the fatality rate ranges from 20 to 30 percent or more. Until 1972, when the risk of contracting smallpox dropped to virtually zero, U.S. residents were routinely immunized. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977, and in May 1980, the World Health Assembly certified that the world was free of naturally
occurring smallpox.

With the increasing possibility of biological terrorist attacks, the CDC has ordered sufficient smallpox vaccine to immunize the entire U.S. population and developed a plan relying on rapid identification and quarantine of smallpox victims and immunization of people who have been directly or indirectly in contact with them.

Bicknell argues that controlling an epidemic with hundreds and perhaps thousands of people exposed simultaneously, in the midst of a highly mobile population that has not been immunized, is logistically not feasible. He questions the CDC's assumption that infected individuals can be recognized, diagnosed, and quarantined within the critical four days after exposure, during which time vaccination may be partially effective. He also doubts that millions of vaccinations can be administered in the midst of the panic that could result if an attack were to occur.

More than 119 million U.S. residents have been born since 1972, when routine vaccination was ended. The immunity of those born earlier is waning and uncertain, says Bicknell. According to an International Communications Research Study, 61 percent of Americans said they would get a smallpox vaccination if it were available.

Bicknell's article, as well as seven others about the public health implications of smallpox and bioterrorism, will appear in the April 25 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The articles are now available, at no cost, on NEJM's Web site, http://nejm.org/earlyrelease/index.asp.

BU's Science and Technology Day on March 26 presented nearly 130 outstanding research posters by graduate students from both the Charles River and the Medical Campuses. Only 10 posters could be singled out for awards, but the judges remarked on the extraordinarily high quality of all the research, as well as the enormous diversity and range of disciplines represented. Beginning with this column, "Research Briefs" will highlight this graduate research.

Ennobling gas. Bennett Goldberg, a CAS physics professor, and Selim Unlu, an ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, have been collaborating with colleagues at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School to produce a promising new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The method uses hyperpolarized forms of the noble gases helium and xenon to produce enhanced images of parts of the body, such as the lungs and segments of the nerves and brain, that have high concentrations of lipids (fat) and low concentrations of water, making them difficult or impossible to see in traditional MRIs.

Greg Blasche (GRS'06), a Ph.D. candidate working in the Goldberg-Unlu lab, has been contributing to this effort by helping to develop a new technology to produce large quantities of polarized gases -- work that earned him the Dean's Award: College of Arts and Sciences at this year's Science and Technology Day.

Hyperpolarized noble gases are generated by shining polarized laser light onto alkali gases, transferring the spin of the photons (a tiny amount of magnetic energy) to the outer electrons, which is further transferred to the nuclei. It is the net magnetic orientation of the nuclei that the MRI reads to create images.

Originally solid-state titanium sapphire lasers were used in this process, but these are difficult to obtain and not economically feasible for large-scale use. Diode lasers, cheaper and more readily available, were found to be optically inefficient for the purpose. Blasche has developed for this purpose a novel external cavity laser with a unique geometry and significantly increased efficiency.

It is able to more closely match the spectral line width of the light emitted by the laser with the spectral range that the gases can most readily use to make the spin transfer. Technical information about this process is available online at http://ultra.bu.edu/projpages/mri/mrilln.html. More information on hyperpolarized noble gas MRI is available at: http://www.bu.edu/features/special/sciencecoalition/mri.html.

"Research Briefs" is written by Joan Schwartz in the Office of the Provost. To read more about BU research, visit http://www.bu.edu/research.

5 April 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations