Be Paranoid About Bioterrorism, Experts Say
Source: Reuters
November 28, 2000
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Experts on national security,
health and biotechnology shared one message on the threat of
bioterrorism Tuesday -- be paranoid.
They said the United States and other nations had
finally heard the message that governments or extremist groups could
make easy use of germs such as anthrax or smallpox to wreak havoc, but
had yet to do much about it.
What efforts are being made were bogged down in politics
and turf wars, the experts said at a meeting on bioterrorism.
"Be paranoid," George Poste, chief executive officer of
Health Technology Networks, a health care consulting group in
Scottsdale, Arizona, told the conference.
"We are vulnerable," he said.
Defense and health officials have agreed since the
mid-1990s that the risk of a bioterrorist attack was high enough to
warrant taking precautions. A weapon containing anthrax -- bacteria
that cause a deadly infection when inhaled -- would be cheap, easy to
make and hard to detect.
"In my judgment, Washington, if not the nation, is past
the level of consciousness-raising," said Richard Falkenrath, an
expert in defense preparedness at Harvard University. "Now we are
getting down to the serious
and much more difficult process of building a (response) system."
But Falkenrath and others agreed not enough money was
being spent and it was not clear who would be in charge in the event
of such an attack. "U.S. biodefense is disorganized and excessively
fragmented," he said.
A recent $3 million exercise called TOPOFF (for top
officials of the U.S. government) showed how things could fall apart.
Conducted last May, it was a simulation of simultaneous attacks --
chemical weapons in Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, plague in Denver and a nuclear "event" in Washington, D.C.
HOSPITALS QUICKLY OVERWHELMED
The exercise showed hospitals were overwhelmed,
officials fought over who was in charge and hudreds of "victims" would
have died if it had been a real emergency.
Falkenrath said the White House and the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were the only federal offices with
the authority to coordinate the myriad of federal, state and local
agencies that would have to be involved in responding to such attacks.
"In my view, neither is really doing the job
effectively," Falkenrath said.
Some of the $13 billion allocated to dealing with
weapons of mass destruction has already gone to programs more
political than useful, he said.
"I see an increasingly wide stratum of pork in there,"
he said, while later declining to elaborate.
Dr. Jeff Koplan, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), said federal programs were slow getting
off the ground.
"We are barely getting started," Koplan told the
conference, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
He said $123.6 million was allocated to his agency for
bioterrorism preparedness in 1999, and $154.68 million for 2000. Yet
Koplan said state and federal health officials were still using pencil
and paper and telephones while their children surfed the Internet to
shop.
"We would like to correct that," he said.
He said 81 CDC labs in 50 states could now test for the
six biological agents considered most likely to be used in an
attack -- plague, tularemia, botulin toxin, smallpox and viral
hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and anthrax.
The CDC has set up eight so-called Push Packages, each
consisting of 109 air cargo containers full of antibiotics and other
medical supplies that could be shipped anywhere on 12 hours notice. He
and Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher decide when and where to deploy
them.
He said the decision to send them was quick, but the
TOPOFF exercise showed things start to fall apart when the packages
need to be distributed.
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by Maggie Fox
Health and Science Correspondent