GAO Pushes to Embed Homeland Security “Standards” Into U.S. Policy-Making

By Siobhan Gorman

National Journal

WASHINGTON — Randall Yim probably doesn’t fit anyone’s picture of a homeland-security evangelist. Calmly sitting cross-legged at a conference table in his office in the General Accounting Office’s drab headquarters, Yim is the antithesis of fire and brimstone. His tone is low-key, almost professorial. And his attire is standard-issue Washington professional — a dark suit and tie. But as the GAO’s managing director for national preparedness, he is heading up the agency’s new effort to think big and long-term about homeland security. And he is relentlessly traveling the country and walking the halls of Congress to try to prod the rest of America into doing the same.

Yim, a native of California and an environmental lawyer by training, came to the nation’s capital in 1998 to assume an only-in-Washington title: principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, logistics, and environment. Within three months, he became deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations. He went on win earn the Defense Department’s Medal for Distinguished Public Service in January 2001. Working with the GAO while still at the Defense Department, Yim caught the eye of GAO Comptroller General David Walker. Impressed by Yim’s intellect, Walker wooed him to the GAO. Yim reported for duty in August 2001 and began to tackle defense and environmental projects. Two weeks later, terrorists slammed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

That day, a crusader was born. “I’m making the classic lawyer mistake,” Yim confessed to National Journal. “I had friends and colleagues killed in the Pentagon attack. Because of that personal connection, I feel a sense of urgency to go forward.” As “homeland security” emerged as a top federal priority, Walker asked Yim to lead an informal task force to give the GAO a handle on the issue. Next, Yim became the first national-preparedness director within the agency’s homeland-security team.

Placing a newcomer in such a high-level role was unusual for the GAO, but the move was part of Walker’s effort to infuse new blood into the staid government watchdog agency. “Randall is very bright.  He’s very creative,” Walker says. Colleagues describe the self-effacing Yim as “an intellectual,” “a visionary,” and “a consensus builder.”

What keeps Yim awake at night is his worry that the nation’s approach to homeland security is unsustainable. Policy makers at all levels, he frets, think of homeland security as merely a “bolt-on” program. He disdainfully compares their attitude to that of the auto industry when it decided not to fundamentally rethink car designs in the 1970s after Ford Pintos started to explode when they were rear-ended. Automakers instead chose to simply bolt on bigger bumpers. Yim’s PowerPoint presentation to local officials even features a slide of a Pinto. His alternative: embedding homeland-security principles into all elements of public policy — from energy regulations to building codes. His challenge: persuading the governmental powers-that-be, especially those in Congress, to make it happen.

While the GAO is careful to maintain its standing as an objective outside evaluator of government endeavors, Yim’s work takes the agency into a new role — that of ideas broker and pitchman. Policy advocacy is “unusual for GAO,” Yim acknowledges. The GAO’s advocacy role on homeland security — coming on the heels of the agency’s lawsuit against Vice President Cheney to try to force him to divulge details of the meetings that led to the administration’s energy policy — suggests that Walker intends to make the government’s chief accountability agency a more potent force.

Although the bulk of the GAO’s work consists of responding to congressional requests, Walker wants 10 percent of his agency’s efforts to be on major initiatives of its own. Walker described them as dealing with “more-strategic, complex, crosscutting, and longer-range issues.”

Walker is determined to sell Congress on the GAO’s conclusions about long-range solutions to what it sees as significant problems. Walker says that his “client” – Congress — is understandably preoccupied with short-term, localized issues because of lawmakers’ focus on winning re-election. But, he adds, the tendency of Congress and the executive branch to think small makes devoting some of the GAO’s energy to thinking big all the more important.

The old reliable GAO seems well suited to thinking about the massive problem of homeland security in the post-9/11 world. It also seems suited to delivering harsh messages about what the nation must do to try to protect itself. In Yim’s view, at least, there’s a crying need for the government to adopt a take-your-medicine-and-eat-your-vegetables approach. As Yim patiently outlined the GAO’s master plan for homeland security — flow charts and all — during two hour-long sessions in his office, he took a page from the environmental chapter of his life. In the 1970s, environmentalists began establishing standards aimed at ensuring that the government and companies were good stewards of Earth’s resources. Similar standards, he says, are needed for homeland security. For example, Yim would like to see a standard for ensuring that financial markets have the technology in place to withstand a variety of terrorist attacks.

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and the private sector are haphazardly trying to establish standards for various aspects of homeland security. But Yim worries that unless these efforts become more unified and standardized, dangerous gaps are inevitable.

Randall Yim isn’t content to just tinker. “One of the concerns I have about homeland security,” he said, “is, we have to begin addressing the core issues.” He quickly ticks off several: Who is in charge? What should be done, and who should be doing it? Who should pay for these changes, and how? How do you hold people accountable?  How do you track progress?

As homeland-security strategies proliferate at all levels of government, Yim is dismayed to see that they are rarely connected to cost considerations — or to one another. He wants to bring the high-flying talk of strategies down to ground level, where planners could focus on such issues as how much it costs states, localities, and private businesses when the federal government raises the national terrorism threat level to, say, Code Orange — where it was for nearly nine weeks this year.

After getting a better sense of costs, the planners’ next step would be to assess what homeland-security precautions are being taken and whether they are actually making the nation safer. Right now, Yim said, federal money is flowing out, and there’s no way to know whether it’s doing any good. Just last week, President Bush signed the $31 billion Homeland Security appropriations bill, which he declared “a major step forward” in efforts “to make our nation more secure.” But no one yet knows how much added security the $31 billion will really buy.

Some $4 billion of the total will go toward resolving the myriad complaints of so-called first responders. Billions of dollars are being spent on first responders, not because the Department of Homeland Security has determined that the country’s greatest needs include ensuring that firefighters nationwide have hazmat suits, but rather because public officials were eager to heed the demands of the heroes of September 11. Plus, lawmakers all have large numbers of firefighters and police officers in their districts.

Among the difficult post-9/11 questions is whether spending money on first responders is the best way to enhance local security. If beefing up first-responder squads is a wise way to spend federal homeland-security funds, are hazmat suits needed more than upgraded walkie-talkies? And are they needed more than computer access to a terrorist watch list?

To begin intelligently answering these questions and weighing one demand against another, Yim said, the GAO should establish standards that detail what government and the private sector must do in order to assure a minimum level of security. There could, for example, be a standard for ensuring that a ship’s cargo is not tampered with en route from Singapore to New York City.

Yim is not alone in seeing the creation of homeland-security standards as crucial. John Cohen, a cop-turned-homeland-security consultant, has helped states and localities, including Massachusetts and Detroit, draw up homeland-security strategies. How important is standardization? “It’s critical,” Cohen said. “You have got to get everybody talking the same language.”

Several commissions have recommended the adoption of homeland-security standards. Most recently, the Council on Foreign Relations, in a project with former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H., advocated national standards for first responders as the council lamented what it saw as their general lack of preparedness. The Gilmore Commission, headed by former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, also strongly advocated standards in its December 2002 report.

No longer the exclusive territory of bean-counters, the wonkish topic of homeland-security standards has come into vogue on Capitol Hill in recent weeks. Lawmakers are targeting their standardization efforts at emergency workers. Meanwhile, various tentacles of the Homeland Security Department are grappling with the creation of an assortment of standards. Private industry may be the furthest along.

Several members of Congress, relative newcomers to the standards debate, have quickly found religion. “We are told Moses traveled in the desert for 40 years because he didn’t have a plan,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said at an October 2 press conference announcing legislation to establish national standards for first responders. “What we’re trying to do with this bill is to get a plan, get standards, so that we know where we are and where we are going.”

In late September, Rep. Jim Turner of Texas, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, started the standards stampede by introducing the PREPARE Act. Turner’s bill, which has attracted a host of Democratic co-sponsors, would require the Department of Homeland Security to establish a task force to recommend first-responder equipment and training standards. Then, the secretary would be required to submit a plan for getting states and localities to adopt the voluntary standards. (Federal funds would be tied to compliance.)

Turner’s initiative was followed by the introduction of a similar bill sponsored by Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the chairman of a Government Reform Committee subcommittee, and Maloney, the head of the House Democrats’ Homeland Security Task Force.

And on October 9, California Republican Christopher Cox, who chairs the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, unveiled part of a comprehensive homeland-security bill that includes a range of proposals — from aligning funding for state and local responders with a given locale’s vulnerability, to bolstering the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence arm. Cox said in an interview that first-responder standards are “something that will be covered in our legislation,” adding that he will work with Turner, Shays, and Maloney. Cox said he plans to mark up his bill before the end of the month.

At the Department of Homeland Security, Alfonso Martinez-Fonts, chief liaison to the private sector, and Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection, have been reaching out to private-sector groups to discuss new safety standards for the financial and telecommunications sectors, among others. Other officials at the department are working on physical-security standards for chemical plants and cargo containers. Still others are forging ahead on standards for emergency-response equipment.

In the private sector, ASIS International, a trade group for the security industry, has been developing standards since June 2001. Earlier this year, it published guidelines to help companies perform a terrorism risk assessment, said Don Walker, who co-chairs ASIS’s guidelines commission and is chairman of Securitas Security Services USA. “There’s bits and pieces of work being developed by lots of organizations,” he said. ASIS will soon release guidelines for how private industry should respond to announced changes in the national threat level. The trade group is also working on guidelines for hiring and training private security guards. And Walker says his commission has listed 30 priority areas in which it wants to develop homeland-security guidelines.

Still, Yim complains that the efforts to establish homeland-security standards aren’t comprehensive. And the focus on training and equipment for first responders isn’t even enough to prepare them adequately for emergencies. Capt. Michael Grossman of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who heads his county’s emergency operations bureau, warns that people from different parts of the government have difficulty understanding one another. He recalled that during the 1992 Los Angeles riots triggered by the beating of motorist Rodney King, the local police responded to a domestic-dispute call and were accompanied by marines for backup. As one of the police officers approached the house, he yelled, “Cover me,” meaning “Watch my back.” To the marines, “Cover me” meant “Lay down fire,” so they fired more than 200 bullets toward the house.  Fortunately, no one was hit.

Creating standards, Yim insists, is the best way to figure out who’s responsible for each aspect of homeland security. Again, he looks to the environmental realm for a positive example: the International Organization for Standardization. It’s known as ISO, which was derived from the Greek isos, meaning “equal.” The group’s American corollary is the American National Standards Institute. Yim and his colleagues want to translate what ISO has done for international environmental policy and apply it to U.S. homeland security.

Launched in 1947, ISO aimed to blend private and public demands for cost control and quality control, so that a company would not be put at a competitive disadvantage for producing a high-quality product. The organization has since established more than 13,700 voluntary standards in business and environmental management that apply to everything from the size of a screw thread to proper procedures for recycling aluminum cans. ISO has two series of standards: ISO 9000 rules deal with general management specifications; ISO 14000 rules specify what a company must do to minimize environmental damage. By defining how things are to be done, these standards clarify both who’s in charge and what they should be doing.

Yim sees promise for homeland security in following the lead of the environmental-standards efforts, which began with rules for toxic-waste cleanup and expanded to include such details as how much radiation a computer screen is allowed to emit. ISO 14000 was among the reforms inspired in the late 1970s by the Love Canal pollution disaster. And as ISO 14000 evolved, it became recognized essentially as common law, so that a company hit with a lawsuit can be held responsible, in court, for failing to meet those standards. For business, Yim said, the selling point was “increased reliability, decreased liability.” That is, companies can feel assured that if they are meeting the standard, they won’t be held accountable for not doing more.

In the realm of homeland security, Yim sees endless opportunities for crafting standards. To name a few: container security; protocols for assessing a city’s vulnerabilities; power-grid protection; building codes; evacuation capacity for main thoroughfares; airline screening procedures; and, of course, emergency-response teams. There could also be standards for a hospital’s capacity to triage patients or for a communications system’s ability to operate despite a power outage. (During the Northeast’s massive blackout this August, the 911 emergency communications systems failed in Detroit and New York City.)

Yim argues that, over time, homeland-security standards would transform the way the government and industry protect the nation. “It’s a strategic approach that links theory to action and, I think, would significantly advance where we need to go as a country in homeland security,” he says. “And it would give us a measure of whether we’re making progress in being better prepared.” Establishing standards would help ensure that there are no weak links in the “homeland-security supply-and-demand chain,” he added. That should make the nation get more for its homeland-security dollar.

Standards would also provide a basis for gathering uniform data on what is or isn’t effective, and for performing cost-benefit analyses. Plus, involving the business sector at the outset would ensure that these standards “are not blind to costs,” Yim said.

Industry standards that the government sees as voluntary could end up being mandated by insurers offering terrorism coverage. And, Yim said, citizens would probably be willing to pay more for a government service — their local 911 system, for example — if they had the assurance that the system met a national standard of quality.

Developing homeland-security standards wouldn’t be quick or cheap, Yim admitted, but he argues that it’s time for homeland-security policy to become less panic-driven. He foresees government and industry working together to craft each individual standard, and he thinks that the GAO should form the teams to design each one.

Since the GAO is the investigative arm of Congress, Congress is its top client, of course. For Yim and his team, the key to success will be whether they can sell the Hill on their homeland-security vision. Although currently fixated on first responders, lawmakers such as Shays and Maloney are open to the idea of standards for other homeland-security arenas as well. Maloney said she’s particularly open to standards involving cargo, power grids, water, and nuclear plants.

In fact, perhaps a homeland-security bill already in circulation will turn out to be just the vehicle Yim and his team need. With that in mind, they have been quietly buttonholing lawmakers in both parties. Yim’s hope is to incorporate a broad notion of homeland-security standards into legislation before Congress adjourns for the year. His immediate window of opportunity will soon close, he fears: Thinking big homeland-security thoughts is unlikely to top many lawmakers’ agendas in an election year.

Back to top

Bolton Expands “Axis of Evil” to Include Cuba, Libya and Syria

The United States is now turning its attention to other countries of concern beyond the original “axis of evil” nations of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said yesterday.

“We’re now turning our attention to Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba,” Bolton said during a speech at the U.S. Embassy in London.

In his remarks, Bolton said that Libya has made increasing efforts since U.N. sanctions were lifted last month to obtain components for its biological and chemical weapons programs (see GSN, Aug. 5). He also strongly criticized Syria, adding that the U.S. Congress was “poised” to approve sanctions against Damascus (see GSN, Oct. 9).

The level of cooperation the United States has received from Syria has been “not satisfactory,” Bolton said (Evans/Beeston, London Times, Oct. 10).

Back to top

U.S. Senate Democrats Criticize Justice Department’s Leak Investigation

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and three other Senate Democrats yesterday criticized the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into the leak of the identity of a CIA operative and reiterated Democratic calls the appointment of a special counsel to oversee the investigation (see GSN, Oct. 8).

In a letter sent yesterday to President George W. Bush, Daschle and Senators Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) outlined “five serious missteps” in Justice’s investigation so far into the leak. The department began its efforts about two weeks ago, upon CIA request, to investigate the leak of the identity of the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had publicly criticized evidence offered by the Bush administration as justification for war with Iraq.

In their letter, the senators criticized the Justice Department for a number of delays in requesting that potentially relevant materials be preserved. For example, the department waited three days after beginning its investigation Sept. 26 to request that the White House order its staff to preserve all relevant materials, the senators said. They also criticized White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s decision to wait until the morning of Sept. 30 to transmit Justice’s order to White House staff.

“Every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that such a delay is a significant departure from standard practice,” the senators wrote.

In addition, the senators criticized the Justice Department’s decision to wait until Oct. 1 before requesting that the Defense and State departments preserve any relevant material their staffs may have possessed. They also repeated claims that Attorney General John Ashcroft is too politically connected to the White House to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan also came under fire in the senators’ letter for remarks he made earlier this week specifically clearing three White House officials of any involvement in the leak — Bush’s senior political adviser Karl Rove, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and National Security Council official Elliott Abrams. During a press conference Tuesday, McClellan said he had determined that Rove, Libby and Abrams had not been involved after speaking with them personally.

“Clearly, a media spokesperson does not have the legal expertise to be questioning possible suspects or evaluating or reaching conclusions about the legality of their conduct,” the senators wrote in their letter.

The letter called on Bush to appoint a special counsel to oversee the leak investigation, saying that public confidence would be “substantially bolstered” by such a move.

The Washington Post reported today, however, that the Justice Department defended its performance so far.

“From the time that career prosecutors at the Department of Justice decided to open an investigation, it has been handled professionally and by the book,” the Post quoted Justice spokesman Mark Corallo as saying.

Back to top

ElBaradei Calls on Iran to Cooperate With IAEA

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency urged Iran yesterday to provide full transparency and to comply with an Oct. 31 U.N. deadline to allay international concerns over Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons development (see GSN, Oct. 9).

“They’ve promised information will be forthcoming but it has not yet been provided,” said IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. “The central question is whether Iran has any (uranium) enrichment activities that we have not been informed about. On that question I haven’t got satisfactory information,” he added.

ElBaradei said, however, that U.N. inspectors in Iran last week were given access to sites that they had requested to visit and were provided with new information by Iranian officials (Roula Khalaf, Financial Times, Oct. 9).

A top U.S. State Department official, meanwhile, said yesterday that the threat of nuclear weapons in Iran had to be “eliminated.”

“There is awareness of the threat posed by Iran and consensus that threat has to be eliminated,” said U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton. Iran, he said, “will try and throw sand in our eyes … to conceal as much as they can, to delay and to avoid having the issue referred to the Security Council.”

Bolton also predicted that Iran could develop a nuclear weapons capability “probably towards the end of the decade” (Richard Norton-Taylor, London Guardian, Oct. 10).

Back to top

United States Wants to Send Plutonium to France

U.S. officials are seeking permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ship 300 pounds of weapon-grade plutonium to a French facility that will manufacture mixed-oxide fuel assemblies for a nuclear reactor in South Carolina, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, May 15).

The shipment would be part of a plan to dispose of 34 tons of plutonium from U.S. nuclear weapons by turning it into mixed oxide fuel for use in U.S. nuclear power reactors. Nuclear nonproliferation groups, however, said the plan is risky and worry that the plutonium could be diverted.

Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis rejected the criticism of the program.

“We will have safe and secure transport for any plutonium that we ship,” Davis said. “Charleston[, S.C.] and federal DOE officials are capable of making sure the shipments arrive safe and secure,” he added.

The Energy Department is planning to transport the plutonium from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico to Charleston, and then on to France. The United States does not currently have a mixed-oxide fuel manufacturing plant, but U.S. officials are looking to build one eventually in South Carolina. In the meantime, they plan to send the plutonium to France next year so it can be tested in a commercial reactor test in 2005.

Davis said that commercial reactor tests are an essential part of the plutonium disposition plan (Josef Hebert, Associated Press/CNN.com, Oct. 10).

Back to top

Russia Tries to Ease NATO Concerns Over Nuclear Weapons Policy

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said yesterday that Russia is not adopting a more aggressive nuclear weapons strategy and remained committed to cooperating with NATO, according to the Associated Press (see GSN, Oct. 9).

Recent media reports have described a Russian Defense Ministry document that threatened to revise Moscow’s nuclear strategy if NATO did not ease its “offensive military doctrine.”

“Russia still regards nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” Ivanov said after meeting with NATO officials in Colorado, but, “In no scenario is there mention of going first with the use of such weapons” (Paul Ames, Associated Press/Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 10).

Ivanov also said, however, that Russia reserved the right to use nuclear weapons “if all other means are exhausted and we have no other way out.”

“We are not going to give that up,” he said (Tom Squitieri, USA Today, Oct. 10).

Back to top

Two Years Later, Anthrax Attack Culprit Still At Large and Cleanup Efforts Continue

By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Two years ago this month, the first reports emerged that people in the eastern United States had become infected with the biological warfare agent anthrax. By the end of November, the 2001 anthrax attacks killed five people in Connecticut, Florida, New York and Washington, and sickened 13 others.

Over the past year, the FBI has had little public success in tracking down those responsible for the anthrax attacks — to the point where a senior FBI official was reported late last month as suggesting that the case might be never be solved. While various U.S. agencies have launched the massive cleanup effort needed to decontaminate the various facilities that were tainted with anthrax, some of the victims still complain of lingering symptoms.

Late last month, several newspapers reported on a set of surprising comments made by FBI Assistant Director Michael Mason, the newly appointed head of the bureau’s Washington field office (see GSN, Sept. 30). According to the Washington Post, Mason said he regretted that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had publicly identified former Army biologist Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest in the case.”

Over the past two years, Hatfill has been the apparent public focus of the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks. In early September, he filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, claiming the department had violated his constitutional rights and damaged his reputation (see GSN, Sept. 2).

Former U.N. inspector Richard Spertzel, who has followed the anthrax investigation, told Global Security Newswire that he hoped Hatfill succeeded in his lawsuit against Justice.

“I sincerely hope Hatfill is able to collect big-time from his lawsuit. To have one’s life ruined on such flimsy reasons is criminal in nature,” Spertzel said. 

Mason was also reported late last month as having said that the FBI’s efforts to recreate the process used to produce the spores used in the attacks had been unsuccessful (see GSN, Nov. 4, 2002). Late last year, experts had praised the FBI’s decision to use this investigative tactic (see GSN, Nov. 11, 2002). While saying that the bureau had been unsuccessful in trying to recreate the process used to produce the anthrax spores, Mason also said that the effort had helped to narrow some aspects of the investigation, according to reports.

“We would not have that if reverse engineering had completely failed to provide us with any information or valuable leads,” Mason was quoted by USA Today as saying.

In addition this past year, another highly visible FBI investigative tactic also apparently resulted in failure, according to reports, when the bureau employed divers to search a forest pond near Frederick, Md. (see GSN, Jan. 28). The discovery of pieces of laboratory equipment within the pond led the FBI this summer to drain it in hopes of finding further evidence. The three-week, $250,000 effort, however, only resulted in the discovery of discarded items unrelated to the attacks, according to reports (see GSN, Aug. 1).

Assistant FBI Director Mason was also reported as having suggested that the anthrax investigation may never be solved — a view shared by some outside experts.

“Most informed folk I have spoken with are of the same opinion that a break is not likely soon or maybe ever,” Martin Hugh-Jones of the Pathological Sciences Department at Louisiana State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine told GSN.

While the FBI has had little success in tracking down those responsible for the anthrax attacks, efforts over the past year to decontaminate the buildings contaminated with spores have had better results. 

In March, the U.S. Postal Service scored a success with the successful decontamination of the Brentwood Road mail-handling facility in Washington, D.C. after more than a year of work. A Postal Service spokesman told GSN in June that the Brentwood facility was expected to reopen by the end of November (see GSN, June 23).

Efforts have also begun to decontaminate several other facilities affected by the attacks, including a U.S. State Department offsite mail facility in Sterling, Va., and a Postal Service mail-handling center in New Jersey. In addition, plans are being prepared to decontaminate the first site contaminated during the attacks — the former headquarters of American Media Inc in Boca Raton, Fla. That building has remained sealed since the discovery of the first two reported anthrax cases — AMI employees Bob Stevens, who died of the disease, and Ernesto Blanco, who came down with inhalational anthrax but recovered.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in August that the firm Consultants in Disease and Injury Control had been awarded the contract to decontaminate the former AMI headquarters. Real estate developer David Rustine, who purchased the building for only $40,000, has reportedly promised to be the first to walk through the building unprotected once it had been decontaminated.

In an effort to help prevent further biological attacks conducted by mail, the Postal Service in July began testing a new anthrax detection system at facilities in 15 cities. An agency spokesman told GSN last month that the test had been a “resounding success” and now the Postal Service is scheduled to begin installing the system nationwide early next year (see GSN, Sept. 9).

While progress has been made in efforts to decontaminate tainted facilities and to develop new techniques to prevent further attacks, many of the survivors of the attacks have been less successful in moving on, according to recent reports (see GSN, 18). In mid-September, the Baltimore Sun reported that a doctor at Baltimore Sinai’s hospital has been monitoring five of the survivors through telephone interviews conducted every three months since the attacks. According to the Sun, the study has found that all five survivors continue to report similar lingering symptoms, such as weakness and memory problems.

In contrast to their experience, the 76-year-old Blanco, the first survivor of the attacks, has so far been the only one to return to work, according to the Associated Press.

“I feel fine,” AP quoted Blanco as saying.

Back to top

Air-Monitoring Stations in Texas Detect Signs of Tularemia

Two air-monitoring stations near Houston, Texas, recently detected signs of the biological weapons agent tularemia, but officials have said they do not think it is indicative of a terrorist attack, the Houston Chronicle reported yesterday. The stations, located in east Harris County, are part of a national system of biological detection stations (see GSN, Jan. 24).

The two stations detected three fragments of the bacteria that cause tularemia Sunday and Monday, officials said. The Houston Health and Human Services Department, along with the U.S. Homeland Security Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have warned area hospitals to watch for human cases of the disease, but none have yet been reported. While tularemia is a biological weapon, it also occurs naturally.

“Everyone is, obviously, very convinced that we haven’t had a terrorist attack,” Houston health department spokeswoman Kathy Barton said.

The detection of tularemia in Houston is the first biological agent of concern detected by the national network — a sign that the system is working, said Homeland Security spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich.

“It shows the system is working, and protecting people,” Petrovich said (Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle, Oct. 9).

Back to top

U.S. Researchers Advance Possible Botulinum Toxin Treatments

U.S. researchers have discovered chemical compounds that prevent the effects of botulinum toxin at the enzyme level — a finding that could aid in developing new treatments against the biological warfare agent, the Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 30).

The chemical compounds were identified by researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Pharmacy. The only currently available treatment against botulinum toxin is a serum of horse antitoxins, which causes side effects, can only be used once and cannot reverse cell damage.

“The eventual drug (resulting from our discovery) will be specific for botox enzymatic activity and, unlike the horse serum, should be able to get inside of the intoxicated neurons,” said Sina Bavari, lead investigator at USAMRIID. 

“This is a huge breakthrough,” Bavari said (Nichole Aksamit, Omaha World-Herald, Oct. 9).