U.S. Vulnerable to Bioterrorism, Experts Warn

Experts on national security, health and biotechnology shared one message Tuesday on the threat of bioterrorism: Be paranoid.

They said the United States and other nations finally understand that governments or extremist groups could make easy use of germs such as anthrax or smallpox to wreak havoc but have yet to do much about it.

What efforts are being made are 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, Ariz., 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 is 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 that not enough money is being spent and that it is not clear who would be in charge in the event of such an attack. “U.S. biodefense is disorganized and excessively fragmented,” Falkenrath said.

A recent $3-million exercise showed how things could fall apart. Conducted last May, it was a simulation of simultaneous attacks--chemical weapons in Portsmouth, N.H., plague in Denver and a nuclear “event” in Washington.

The exercise found that hospitals were overwhelmed, officials fought over who was in charge and hundreds of “victims” would have died if it had been a real emergency.

Falkenrath said the White House and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are the only federal offices with the authority to coordinate the myriad 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.

Federal Programs Are Just Getting Started

Some of the $13 billion allocated to dealing with weapons of mass destruction has already gone to programs more political than useful, Falkenrath said.

“I see an increasingly wide stratum of pork in there,” he said, later declining to elaborate.

Dr. Jeff Koplan, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that federal programs are slow getting off the ground.

“We are barely getting started,” Koplan told the conference, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He said that $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 are still using pencil and paper and telephones while their children surf the Internet to shop.

“We would like to correct that,” he said.

Koplan said that 81 CDC labs in 50 states can now test for the six biological agents considered most likely to be used in an attack: plague, tularemia, botulin toxin, smallpox, 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. Koplan and Surgeon General David Satcher decide when and where to deploy them.

But Koplan said the recent exercise showed that things start to fall apart when the packages need to be distributed.