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Experts Say U.S. Remains Unprepared for Biological Attack, Despite Progress on Biodefense
Significant increases in spending on biological defense have not yet filled large gaps in the U.S. safeguards against biological terrorism, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, April 5). “There’s no area of homeland security in which the administration has made more progress than bioterrorism, and none where we have further to go,” said Richard Falkenrath of the Brookings Institution, who left his post as deputy homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush in May. The Bush administration has dramatically increased biodefense funding, from $414 million in fiscal 2001 to a proposed $7.6 billion this year, according to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Biosecurity Center. Many areas of domestic defense come under the umbrella of the Homeland Security Department, according to the Post, while responsibility for biodefense is dispersed across several agencies. The jurisdictions of the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services departments overlap in many areas of biodefense. Bush administration officials say their respective roles are delineated clearly, but bureaucratic blockages and turf wars persist, the Post reported. The “explosive growth” in biotechnology has expanded the know-how for producing microbes resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, according to a 2003 CIA report. Nations such as Iran probably have the ability to produce such biological weapons, according to experts. While that might be beyond the reach of terrorist organizations, groups such as al-Qaeda could launch an attack on livestock or crops, according to experts. “You don’t need to manipulate genetics to spread foot-and-mouth disease in cattle,” said David Franz, who headed the military’s top biodefense research lab at Fort Detrick, Md. “You can see economic damage that adds up not to millions, but to tens of billions of dollars.” The federal government’s expectation that state and local health agencies would distribute vaccines and drugs is “the Achilles’ heel” of U.S. biodefenses, Falkenrath told the Post. “The single biggest problem is the nonperformance of state and local public health agencies” in drawing up plans that U.S. officials have requested on how they would respond rapidly to a biological attack, said Falkenrath. The plans would detail how officials expect to deliver medicines arriving at airports. “From tarmac to bloodstream, their time frames are way too lackadaisical,” he said. Most U.S. hospitals also lack the “surge capacity” — the ability to quickly increase staffing to treat a large number of people — to respond to a bioterrorism attack, the Post reported. The United States needs new antidotes and vaccines to prepare for a bioterrorism event. Despite increased efforts at the National Institutes of Health, however, the creation and stockpiling of new drugs has been slow, experts and U.S. officials said. The government “is on a wartime footing,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “People who say we haven’t made progress are not well informed about what it takes to make vaccine.” “This is light speed. … Usually vaccines can take many years or decades,” he added (see GSN, Nov. 5). “Some of the criticism of the past was valid,” Fauci said. “But we’ve already shown we’ve been successful” in making scientific progress. Some believe that Bush should name a bioterrorism “czar” to bring the issue into public focus. “The country cannot do what’s needed to get prepared for bioattacks without very visible national leadership from the president,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity and a former Clinton administration adviser. “We’re not yet treating this like a national security emergency.” (Mintz/Warrick, Washington Post, Nov. 8).
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