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Travel poses devastating threatBy Ronald G. Larson for CNN  Larson: Modern travel networks create the potential to spread a pandemic virus worldwide. VISIONARIES
QUICKVOTEYOUR SAY
(CNN) -- Novel viruses, such as SARS and "bird flu" (avian influenza) pose a continual threat of a worldwide pandemic, as the world's population becomes increasingly mobile. The pandemic could be on the scale of the massive influenza pandemic that killed between 20 and 50 million people in 1918-1919 -- two percent of the world's population -- and smaller, but still devastating, influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968. Modern worldwide travel networks create the potential to spread a pandemic virus -- such as bird flu -- globally in the time it takes for an airplane to cross an ocean or a continent. This means the spread could happen before symptoms appear, making it difficult to differentiate a pandemic virus from an ordinary flu or cold. Fortunately, novel "lab-on-chip" technologies are emerging that offer the potential for rapid, inexpensive, portable, genotyping of viruses, allowing the possibility of "on-the-spot" diagnosis. These may use simple throat samples, not only to detect the presence of an influenza virus in a subject, but also whether or not it is a pandemic strain. A few molecules of genetic material, DNA or RNA, obtained from throat sample, for example, can be amplified into millions or billions of copies using the proteins that living cells use to copy their DNA. Several laboratories have now succeeded in carrying out this reaction on a miniaturized format. This is a critical step towards making portable viral detection a reality because it creates a large enough sample of identical molecules to make biochemical analyses possible. If used at transportation checkpoints, such as airports, during high-threat periods, or routinely at the sources of such flu strains, such as at Asian poultry farms, much more rapid detection and response to an outbreak might be possible, saving perhaps millions of lives. While the development of such devices is not imminent, the basic technology is in place or rapidly emerging, and such devices might well be ready for field-testing in five to 10 years, and deployment by the next decade. Ronald G. Larson is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan 
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