By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — As part of the effort to prepare for a potential bioterrorist attack against the United States, health officials must take steps to better track and monitor public health trends nationwide, a General Accounting Office official said this week (see GSN, Aug. 6).

“Gaps remain in state and local disease surveillance systems, which are essential to public health efforts to respond to disease outbreaks or bioterrorist attacks,” according to Janet Heinrich, GAO director of public health issues, in prepared testimony this week to the House Select Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness.

According to Heinrich, U.S. health officials must develop an efficient system to quickly move information from local medical workers to national health officials.  Current attempts to monitor health trends, she said, suffer from “chronic underreporting and outdated laboratory facilities.”

“Whether a disease outbreak occurs naturally or due to the intentional release of a harmful biological agent by a terrorist, much of the initial response would occur at the local level, particularly at hospitals and their emergency departments … however, preparedness limitations may impact hospitals’ ability to conduct disease surveillance,” she said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month awarded $4.2 million to 10 state and city governments in an effort to improve medical tracking.

Shelly Hearne, executive director of the nonpartisan group Trust for America’s Health, praised the recent grants and renewed her organization’s call for better health tracking in a statement last week.  While the CDC grant will be split among 10 health agencies — California, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, New York City, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — Hearne’s organization projects that a comprehensive national health tracking network would cost $275 million annually.

“A robust integrated health tracking network will not only alert health officials to increases and patterns of diseases like asthma,” Hearne said, “it could also pinpoint a surge in illness that might indicate a biological or chemical attack had occurred.”

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