Officials Address Bioterrorism Fears

Top state and county officials sought to reassure residents Friday that law enforcement and the medical community are prepared to deal with bioterrorism and that no credible threats have been received in California.

“There’s hardly a situation you can imagine that we haven’t thought of and tried to take measures to protect you against,” Gov. Gray Davis told a crowd of several hundred at UCLA. “Our whole world changed on Sept. 11, and we are now devoting virtually all of our time to protecting you and keeping California secure.”

Later, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca held a news conference with more than a dozen federal, state and county law enforcement officials and others to try to allay the concerns of Southern California residents.

“The biggest challenge to Los Angeles County is not anthrax,” Baca said. “Our biggest challenge is fear. . . . Simply, fear is more infectious in Los Angeles County than anthrax.”

About 170 incidents of threatened terrorism have been investigated in the county, Baca said. These include suspicious letters or packages that did not have return addresses and were unrecognizable by the recipient, and, in a few cases, contained white powder. None were found to be credible threats by terrorists, and many were hoaxes, officials said.

The FBI, which has investigated more than 100 calls about suspicious packages, threats and hoaxes in the Los Angeles region, is close to filing criminal charges against several people, said Ronald L. Iden, who heads the agency’s field office in Los Angeles.

“For the most part,” he said, “these are people who are taking advantage of the situation and frightening people needlessly.”

A threat of bioterrorism is a federal offense; threats of injury are punishable by up to five years in prison, and death threats--even when a powder or substance is not present--could be punishable by life in prison, Iden said.

Davis, surrounded by dozens of doctors and other officials, said private physicians and family doctors are being trained to spot symptoms of anthrax and smallpox--and how to respond if they find them.

The state has set up a public health safety hotline at (800) 550-5234 and placed bioterrorism information on the Web at https://www.dhs.ca.gov. State officials also are communicating with California’s 61 local public health officers on a secure Web site “so everyone knows what everybody is learning at the same time,” Davis said.

“The best mass vaccine against fear is good, accurate information,” he said. “We do not want people to panic. We want them to be informed and prepared.”

Davis said that California Highway Patrol officers are watching “the aqueducts, reservoirs, the dams, the bridges,” and that local authorities are guarding refineries, power and chemical plants and the state’s power grid against attack.

“They’re forming a security blanket that I’m proud to tell you is very difficult to penetrate,” he said.

Private physicians are being trained to recognize symptoms of bioterrorism via Internet sites and satellite television, medical experts said.

“It may very well be a primary-care physician who sees the first case” of bioterrorism in California, said Dr. David Pegues, an infectious diseases expert who heads a UCLA task force on bioterrorism preparedness.

“Smallpox was eradicated from the United States in the 1940s,” he said. “Rare is the physician who has seen a case. But rare is the physician today who isn’t interested in learning about the presentation of smallpox, how the skin lesions can be differentiated from those of chicken pox.”

As the FBI’s Iden said: “We need to be alert, we need to be vigilant, but we need to remain calm.”