What is TOXI-Triage

The multi-million pound TOXI-Triage project has been funded by the European Commission and brings together 18 teams spanning the emergency and health services, defence, industry, and university academics.

Together the research team have developed advanced methods to determine the level of casualty exposure to poisons; created new payloads for drones that contain radiological and poison cloud monitoring instrumentation; designed new systems for mapping the environmental impact of an incident and managing decontamination activity; developed new tools to tackle the spread of fake news during an incident; and created a way to utilise social media during an emergency situation.

At Loughborough, academics from Chemistry (archived 20 12 21), Design, Business and Economics and Social Sciences have been working on the project, along with campus-based industrial partner T4i Engineering.

Paul Thomas, Professor of Analytical Science from Loughborough’s Department of Chemistry, is leading TOXI-Triage.  He said: “Over the last four years some of the strongest teams across Europe have been working together to help ensure society can respond to and tackle a CBRN incident in the best possible way.

Professor Paul Thomas

We live in a time where CBRN terrorism is a real threat, and incidents such as the Birling Gap gas cloud and Japan’s Fukushima nuclear crisis illustrate how CBRN incidents can and do occur as a result of human error or a natural disaster.

Professor Paul Thomas Professor of Analytical Science

"The emergency services need to have the best possible information when a CBRN incident occurs, in the quickest time possible without having to put further lives at risk. TOXI-Triage has created new hot zone assessment, diagnostic, communications and track and tag triage technologies, along with an integrated system that pulls all the information together in real time.

"TOXI-Triage is truly revolutionary and sets to rewrite the way a CBRN incident is managed."