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U.S. Response: Disease Monitoring Worked Well at Olympics, Experts Say The 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City provided a good test for the Real-Time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance system, an information tracking system used to detect the initial stages of a biological attack, NewsRx.com reported today (see GSN, Feb. 26). “If you’ve got a lot of people in the community getting sick at the same time with the same thing, this system will see it,” said Per Gesteland, a physician at the University of Utah. “This sort of system is essential as an early detector for bioterrorist events,” said Reed Gardner, chairman of medical informatics at the University of Utah. The system twice detected unusual activity during the two sporting events, according to NewsRx.com (see GSN, Feb. 6). The first occurred midway through the Olympics, when the system detected that the number of viral infections reached seven in one county that hosted the games, Morgan County. The alarm level for viral infections per day for Morgan County was 6.69, NewsRx.com reported. The second incident occurred near the end of the Paralympics, when the system detected 33 incidents of patients seeking treatment for bleeding in the seven Utah counties monitored by the system. The expected number of cases typically was 29.34, according to NewsRx.com. In each of the two incidents, the system alerted Gesteland, Utah State Epidemiologist Robert Rolfs and the system’s developers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, NewsRx.com reported. When alerted, Gesteland examined details and then consulted with the system technical advisory group, a panel of state and local public health officials. If there had been a real biological weapons attack, the panel would have had to report within two hours to a policy advisory group, which then would have had to devise a plan of action, according to NewsRx.com. After examining information provided by the system, however, Gesteland was able to determine that both events were false alarms, according to NewsRx.com. Gesteland is attempting to obtain funding to keep the system, which is still operational, running on a permanent basis and to expand its information-gathering capabilities (NewsRx.com, May 20).
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