Threat Assessment:  United States Still Vulnerable to Attack, Experts Say

Even though the United States has spent millions of dollars to improve public health defenses against a biological attack, experts have said vulnerabilities still exist in several areas, particularly the U.S. food supply, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, June 12).

The U.S. public health system has received $1 billion since the anthrax attacks last fall.  States have used the funds to hire workers to respond to intentional or natural disease outbreaks and generally to better prepare defenses against a biological attack, the Times reported (see GSN, June 7; Stolberg/Miller, New York Times, Sept. 9).

During the last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has distributed more than $900 million to state and local public health departments to better improve their readiness for a biological attack, the agency said in a Sept. 4 press release.

“That money is helping to build better laboratories and better systems for detecting a potential terrorist attack, as well as expanded communications systems to get information to public health workers and clinicians quickly,” CDC Director Julie Gerberding said in the release.  “These investments will not only pay off in terms of terrorism preparedness, but public health in general will also benefit” (U.S. State Department release, Sept. 6).

Public health officials have said they now pay more attention to infectious diseases, according to the New York Times.  Georges Benjamin, head of the Maryland Health Department, said his staff now prepares a monthly e-mail report of international disease outbreaks.

“We didn’t feel threatened by that before,” said Benjamin, who is also president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.  “The world has changed.  Every time we get an outbreak at all, the first question we ask is, ‘Was this intentional?’”

U.S. hospitals, however, are not as prepared to respond to a biological attack, said Jerome Hauer, director of the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Public Health Preparedness.  While hospitals have received an additional $135 million, that is not enough, he said.  President George W. Bush proposed allocating $518 million in fiscal 2003 to improve hospital preparedness, the Times reported.

One area of concern is “surge capacity” — the ability for hospitals to accommodate a sudden increase in patients, according to the Times.  Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has said he wants every state to develop plans that would enable hospitals to handle an additional 500 patients on any day in 2002, and an additional 1,500 patients on any day in 2003.

“Five hundred patients is feasible so long as people understand that not everybody is going to be in a hospital-style bed with all the accouterments,” said James Bentley, a senior vice president at the American Hospital Association.  “If we have to start using elementary schools or armories or other kinds of settings, that’s what we will have to do.”

Hospitals that typically compete with each other have begun to coordinate their efforts, the Times reported.  Paul Pepe, who heads the emergency department at Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, said hospitals in the area were considering “cross-credentialing” doctors so they could treat patients at any location.

“We’re talking about buying in bulk, in economies of scale, with everybody participating,” Pepe said.  “Everybody is anteing up.”

“There is a long way to go,” Bentley said.  “It is going to probably take five years to get where we ought to be.”

Food Safety

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has not paid enough attention to the threat of biological attacks on the plants and animals in the U.S. food supply, said many experts, including Thompson (see GSN, Feb. 27).  The Food and Drug Administration has doubled the number of food inspectors this year to 1,500.  Thompson has said, however, that the United States is “woefully inadequate in this area,” labeling it his biggest concern.

Potential biological weapons attacks on the U.S. food supply have had too low a priority in the U.S. war on terrorism, many scientists and officials said.  The United States has concentrated its efforts on countering terrorist threats to people and the relatively low priority given to agriculture was based, in part, on the U.S. success in controlling diseases, a Bush administration official said.

“Most people take the programs for granted because we have been so well protected,” Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said in an interview yesterday.

Defending against possible biological attacks has been a high priority, Veneman said.  Since Sept. 11, she has formed a homeland defense council to offer advice and has began other measures to reduce the vulnerability of the U.S. food supply to attack, such as increased border inspections and research funding.

Critics, however, have said the department has not done enough, partly because of bureaucratic inertia and because of a culture of secrecy at the top of the department.

“There is a true crisis in agricultural biosecurity that stems in part from hostility to the very notion of vulnerability at the top of the Department of Agriculture,” said Thomas Frazier, president of GenCon, a nonprofit group that promotes scientific and educational projects affecting agriculture.

The issue can be illustrated by a dispute over the delayed release of a draft report from the National Research Council entitled Countering Agricultural Bioterrorism:  A Framework of Action, according to the Times.

The report, which the Times obtained a copy of, says that “gaps in biological and intelligence data on foreign-plant and foreign-animal pest and pathogens,” along with inadequate border inspections, increase the likelihood that a terrorist armed with an agricultural disease, such as foot-and-mouth virus, could enter the country and deliberately cause an outbreak.

Agriculture inspects only 1 percent of all private vehicles entering the United States, according to the report.  The United States has not created “in-depth plans for defense against the intentional introduction of biological agents directed at agriculture,” the report says.

Lawyers for Agriculture and the Office of Homeland Security asked the National Academy of Sciences, which conducted the study, not to publish the report since it could aid terrorists in attacking the U.S. food supply, NAS Executive Director E. William Colglazier said.  Prior to the report’s release, the academy had been willing to remove secret data or information that might be harmful to national security, but the administration had not identified any such information, Colglazier said.

Scientists who were involved in the study have said the report contains no secret information and the vulnerabilities in the U.S. food supply discussed in the report can be found in other information available online.  The NAS does plan to publish a version of the study, which it would edit, Colglazier said.

Agriculture spokeswoman Alicia Harris said neither her department nor the Office of Homeland Security requested that the NAS report be kept from the public (Stolberg/Miller, New York Times).

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Russia:  Bureaucrats Continue to Block U.S. Access

Russian officials have blocked recent U.S. attempts to learn more about certain aspects of the former Soviet biological weapons program, including a genetically modified strain of anthrax that Russia has previously promised to give the United States, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said Friday (see GSN, Aug. 19).

Lugar said he was unsuccessful, during visit last month of a U.S. congressional delegation to Russia, in resolving a five-year dispute over the strain of genetically modified anthrax (see GSN, Aug. 19).  The U.S. Defense Department entered into contract in 1997 with the Russian State Research Center for Applied Microbiology, which developed the strain, to obtain a sample.  Russia, however, has refused to give the United States a sample, citing export laws.

Russian officials also blocked an attempt by the U.S. delegation to visit one of four military-run biological research facilities, which have remained closed to U.S. access despite more than 10 years of U.S.-Russian cooperation on nonproliferation, according to the Washington Post.

Even though there has been progress on several proliferation concerns, the refusals highlighted lingering “bureaucratic opposition” to cooperation on the war on terrorism promised by Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush during a summit last November, Lugar said.

“It shows that Putin is far ahead of much of Russia’s bureaucracy on these matters,” he said (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, Sept. 8).

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