U.S. Response:  House Votes For Project Bioshield

The U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation yesterday to enact the Project Bioshield Act of 2003, a federal program to develop medicines that would defend the nation from a bioterrorist attack (see GSN, July 1).

“The wolves of terrorism are still on the lurk,” said House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas).

The House voted 421-2 to establish Project Bioshield, which would provide $5.6 billion over the next decade to push research into normally unprofitable drugs.  The plan would guarantee pharmaceutical companies a buyer for drugs that can be used to counter terrorism.

Supporters of the plan said it will prove worthwhile if there is an attack with dangerous biological agents.

“Essentially, the product has no value if you don’t need it, but infinite value if you do,” said Gillian Woollett, an official with BIO, the biotechnology trade organization (Sheryl Stolberg, New York Times, July 17).

Yesterday’s legislation established the framework for the plan, but the House Appropriations Committee must still address the issue.  Because bipartisan support for the legislation is so overwhelming, the committee is expected to approve the full $5.6 billion over the next ten years, according to an spokeswoman for Representative Billy Tauzin (R-La.), the sponsor of yesterday’s bill and the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.  The money will be appropriated all at once, but officials will be forced to spend it over the full decade, according to the spokeswoman.

Officials will be able to spend $3.4 billion over the next five years (David McGlinchey, Global Security Newswire, July 17).

Two Republican representatives, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Ron Paul of Texas, voted against the bill, while U.S. President George W. Bush applauded the move.

“This legislation will help spur the development and availability of next-generation countermeasures against biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons,” Bush said.

Meanwhile, the plan has stalled in the Senate while lawmakers argue over whether to allocate funding for the program in one lump sum or annually.

“I urge the Senate to act on this very important legislation,” Bush said (Vicki Kemper, Los Angeles Times, July 17).

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Smallpox:  Officials Want Renewed Immunization Effort

The U.S. smallpox immunization program has essentially ground to a halt, but U.S. officials and public health experts are pushing for a resumption in vaccinations, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 15).

“Our goal at this point should be to meet (President Bush’s) plan and to vaccinate the number of people originally targeted in the health care community of between 400,000 and 500,000,” said William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.  “I would certainly be more comfortable if we had that number of civilians prepared to respond,” he added.

Some public health experts have said that the end of the Iraq war has undermined the immunization drive.

“People are now back in dumb-and-happy mode,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins University.  She said the nation no longer has the sense of urgency that it had “when we were going into Iraq, and the possibility of a smallpox attack was seen as much more plausible.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year said it would take more than 1 million immunized health workers to operate enough stations to vaccinate the country within 10 days, but Yale University professor Edward Kaplan has said that the United States has a long way to go to reach that goal.

“If you believe it’s a serious threat — and plenty of credible folks do believe it is a threat — then it makes sense to be ready to push the button,” Kaplan said.  “We are not in a position to respond rapidly if we have to,” he added (Ceci Connolly, Washington Post, July 17).

As of July 4, less than 38,000 civilian health care workers had received the vaccination (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention release, July 4).

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Anthrax:  Bacterium Toxin Can Disable Immune System, Scientists Say

Researchers have discovered how anthrax is able to evade the human immune system — a finding that could lead to the development of better treatments against the disease, BBC News reported today (see GSN, July 10).

Scientists have learned that “lethal factor,” one of three toxins produced by the anthrax bacterium, is able to disable dendritic cells, which help stimulate the body’s immune system, according to BBC News.  When these cells are disabled, the body is unable to stimulate the immune response, allowing infection to spread within the body, said Bali Pulendran of Emory University.

“Our ultimate goal is to apply this novel finding to develop better anthrax treatments and to shape future research into controlling immune responses more appropriately,” Pulendran said (BBC News, July 17).

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Food Safety:  FDA Awards Contract to Review Food Safety

The U.S. Food And Drug Administration announced yesterday that it has awarded a contract for a research group to review the nation’s food safety (see GSN, June 12).

“The Institute of Food Technologists review will focus on preventative controls and research needs that might be used for eliminating or reducing the risk of an intentional act of terrorism or contamination for high- and medium-risk combinations of various food commodities and agents,” the FDA said in a statement.

The institute will look at possible technologies that could protect the food supply.

The review, which is scheduled for completion in June 2004, will not be made public, Reuters reported (Reuters, July 15).

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Smallpox:  New York Might Dump Hundreds of Smallpox Doses

New York state might have to destroy hundreds of doses of smallpox vaccine because so few volunteers took part in the immunization program, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, June 30).

In January, state officials ordered 8,000 doses, in 80 vials, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  As part of U.S. President George W. Bush’s smallpox immunization campaign, New York officials estimated that 16,000 volunteers would receive the vaccine, but only 747 have so far stepped forward.

The expiration date is nearing for some of the doses left in the 26 vials that were opened, AP reported.  The opened vaccine expires after 90 days and will have to be destroyed, according to New York state Health Department spokeswoman Kristine Smith (Associated Press/Newsday, July 15).

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Anthrax:  U.S. Postal Service to Begin Anthrax-Detection Equipment Tests

The U.S. Postal Service is expected today to begin testing a new anthrax-detection system at postal facilities in 15 cities, according to the Los Angeles Times (see GSN, June 9).  The tests are expected to last for one month, the Postal Service said (Los Angeles Times, July 14).

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French Response:  France Unprepared for Biological Terrorist Attack

France is not prepared for a biological weapons attack, according to a report from the French health and research ministries released last week (see GSN, March 25).

“The country has shown in recent years a limited ability to deal with the problem of infectious diseases, which means it is one of the least prepared for the problem of a massive epidemic,” the report says.

The report said that the French government has not taken the threat of biological terrorist attacks seriously enough.  The ministries also accused the French military of not taking steps to defend against chemical or biological warfare.

“The level of the country’s preparedness against infectious diseases is embryonic, and this is the consequence of political choices that have been made,” the report says (Reuters, July 9).

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U.S. Response I:  Experts Criticize Plan to Monitor Air for Pathogens

Experts are continuing to criticize a Bush administration plan that has placed sensors around the country to constantly monitor air quality for evidence of biological terrorism, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Jan. 24).

Supporters said the plan, dubbed “Biowatch,” allows authorities to discover if a dangerous agent has been released long before victims become ill.

“Prior to it being rolled out, the only real way to tell if a biological agent had been released was to see if people started turning up sick or worse,” said Bob Bostock, homeland security chief for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Critics said the system’s sensors would not detect harmful agents in enclosed areas such as airports or subways, and outdoor biological attacks would probably not spread far enough to reach the sensors.

“The probability of being able to identify something in time to make some sort of public health decision, is pretty small,” said Jacqueline Cattani, director of the Center for Biological Defense at the University of South Florida.  “If you saw planes going over and releasing major clouds of this stuff, there’s a chance that people would get suspicious a long time before anybody checked the filters,” she added.

Calvin Chue, a researcher at the Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies at Johns Hopkins University, said the cost of the system will be high and the probability of detecting an attack will be low.

The system includes at least 31 cities, and the White House announced earlier this year it expects the program will cost $1 million per city each year (Associated Press/NBC, July 11).

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U.S. Response II:  Biological Defense Projects Divert Funds From Other Medical Research, Experts Say

Experts have said that the Bush administration’s plans for increased biological defense research could take away necessary funding from other medical research projects, BBC News reported yesterday.

For example, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases plans to spend $145 million to purchase and test a new experimental anthrax vaccine (see GSN, July 10).  Half of that funding, however, will be taken from research projects on other diseases, such as AIDS, under White House orders due to a lack of congressional funding, according to BBC News.

Luis Montaner of the Wistar Institute said he had just begun an AIDS research project when his funding was cut.

“This basically means for our own research that we have to scale back, to readdress our aims and perhaps accomplish less than what we would have hoped we could accomplish,” Montaner said.  “If there is a commitment that bioterrorism needs to be met by a comprehensive scientific agenda which includes, for example, anthrax vaccines, that should not be at the expense of other, equally important research programs,” he said (Richard Black, BBC News, July 10).

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