Vaporous decontamination methods were used in the remediation of anthrax contaminated buildings following the 2001 attacks in the U.S.A. Since then the development of vaporous decontamination methods has received considerable interest with significant advancements in the area of CB decontamination of buildings and sensitive equipment. This document reviews the current state of vaporous decontam...

Firefighters are exposed to carcinogens such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) during fires and from their personal protective equipment (PPE). Recent research has shown that decontamination processes can reduce contamination on both gear and skin. While firefighter cultures that honor dirty gear are changing, little is known about current attitude...

In this paper we consider the decontamination problem in a hypercube network of size n. The nodes of the network are assumed to be contaminated and they have to be decontaminated by a sufficient number of agents. An agent is a mobile entity that asynchronously moves along the network links and decontaminates all the nodes it touches. A decontaminated node that is not occupied by an agent is re-...

The risk of incidents involving mass decontamination in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear release has increased in recent years, due to technological advances, and the willingness of terrorists to use unconventional weapons. Planning for such incidents has focused on the technical issues involved, rather than on psychosocial concerns. This paper presents a novel exper...

Previous studies have demonstrated that rapid evacuation, disrobing and emergency decontamination can enhance the ability of emergency services and acute hospitals to effectively manage chemically-contaminated casualties. The purpose of this human volunteer study was to further optimise such an "Initial Operational Response" by (1) identifying an appropriate method for performing improvised ski...

Chemical and biological warfare agents (CBWA's) are diverse in nature; volatile acute low-molecular-weight toxic compounds, chemical warfare agents (CWA's, gaseous choking and blood agents, volatile nerve gases and blister agents, nonvolatile vomit agents and lacrymators), biological toxins (nonvolatile low-molecular-weight toxins, proteinous toxins) and microbes (bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae...

The occurrence of nucleic acid cross contamination in the laboratory resulting in false positive results of diagnostic samples is seriously problematic. Despite precautions to minimize or even avoid nucleic acid cross contaminations, it may appear anyway. Until now, no standardized strategy is available to evaluate the efficacy of commercially offered decontamination reagents. Therefore, a prot...

In Korea, there are not detailed analysis data on soil contamination in nuclear power plant(NPP) and suitable treatment criteria of contaminated soils. When the soils of NPP were contaminated, they have been simply collected and kept in radioactive waste building. But contamination of soils in NPP is inevitable and enormous amounts of contaminated soils can be produced during decommissioning. T...

In this paper we consider the network decontamination problem in a mobile cellular automata (MCA). The system consists of a two-dimensional lattice that evolves like a cellular automata, where however some cells are in a special active state. Such a state indicates the presence of an agent which also follows a local transition rule to move from cell to neighbouring cell. A dynamic contamination...