U.S. Response:  Two Groups Urge Better Health Communication, Coordination

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States needs better communication and coordination among agencies at various levels of government in order to better respond to fast-moving disease outbreaks, such as in the case of a bioterrorism attack, two groups of researchers said yesterday in new reports.

According to the first report, released yesterday by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, Washington must commit long-term funding to build a nationwide health communication system if the nation’s health system is to be adequately equipped to detect or respond to a potential bioterrorism incident.

Funded by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, the report was prepared over 18 months.  It includes a broad variety of recommendations for improving public information and intra- and interagency communication to better deter and respond to a potential terrorist attack.

Led by Michael Powers, a senior fellow at the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute and former arms control and nonproliferation analyst with Boeing, the authors said U.S. public health officials need more “robust” communications systems at and among all levels of government to foster better outbreak monitoring, communication before and during crises and training and education programs.

“Federal funding must be provided with a long-term commitment to support a national health communication system,” the authors wrote, adding that state and local governments do not have the requisite resources to fund such an enterprise.

“The foundations for a nationwide health and medical communications network have just been established.  In the end, only a serious and sustained financial commitment can put the technical infrastructure in place and build the social network to make a truly effective public health information and communication system a reality.  Efforts to build the necessary technical and social infrastructure are ongoing, but not at the needed levels of intensity,” the report reads.

Powers said in an interview that the U.S. public safety and public health spheres present two separate problems where communications infrastructure is concerned.  Public safety networks exist that can be gradually integrated into an adequate national system, he said, while public health presents a chance to build infrastructure that in many cases is sorely lacking.

“What you’re trying to do is almost, in a sense, build from scratch,” Powers said of information technology infrastructure in some parts of the country’s health system.

Powers said health facilities in even some medium-sized cities rely on antiquated computers and do without the most basic networking capabilities.

“For them to put together some kind of IT-based monitoring system or communication system [would] be very difficult,” he said.

Institute senior fellow Jonathan Ban said existing Centers for Disease Control systems — including the Health Alert Network, which relies in part on faxes and e-mail, and the nascent National Electronic Disease Surveillance System, which now has at least a small presence in most states — could provide a basis for an eventual national network capable of detecting and responding to a bioterrorism incident in timely fashion.

The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System, he said, could support the wide dissemination of data from many small-scale systems such as the University of Pittsburgh’s Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance project (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2002) and the Rapid Syndrome Validation Project in New Mexico.

Ban cautioned, though, that any rapid, truly national disease surveillance system will take time to emerge.

“It’s a long-term prospect to get this into place. … If we put a lot of money at it, we might be able to get something in the five- to seven-year range,” he said.

Despite their call for federally funded infrastructure improvements, the researchers stressed the importance of improving health workers’ ability to recognize signs of a chemical or biological attack.

“Technical surveillance systems should not be viewed as a ‘silver bullet,’” they wrote, calling for improved training and education programs for health workers that “include response techniques for a wider variety of terrorism contingencies.”

Trust for America’s Health Calls for More Coherence

The Trust for America’s Health said yesterday in a separate report that U.S. handling of animal-borne diseases is largely uncoordinated and in need of reform.

The study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Palmer Foundation, focused on recent outbreaks of monkeypox, West Nile virus, “mad cow” disease, Lyme disease and chronic wasting disease (see GSN, June 12).

The authors, who included American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin and Trust for America’s Health Executive Director Shelley Hearne, said that up to seven Cabinet-level agencies and hundreds of state and local organizations have participated in responding to the outbreaks, with little discernible overall coordination.

The researchers called for congressional hearings on creating a national system to handle such diseases and for a national tracking network.

“Leadership is needed to ensure that the various governmental agencies — at the federal, state and local level — are coordinated, well-functioning and capable of responding rapidly across jurisdictional boundaries.  Just as the Department of Homeland Security coordinates different aspects of national security, there must be a concerted effort to ensure that we, as a nation, attack animal-borne diseases in a high-priority, unified, coherent, streamlined and well-managed way,” the report reads.

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Anthrax:  Maryland Pond Search Turns Up No New Evidence

Law enforcement sources have said that soil samples taken from a pond near Frederick, Md., which the FBI drained as part of its investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, tested negative for anthrax, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 3).

The FBI spent three weeks and $250,000 to drain the pond, where agents had earlier recovered pieces of laboratory equipment (see GSN, June 30).  However, the operation revealed only discarded items, such as a gun and a bicycle, that appear to be unrelated to the anthrax attacks, sources said.

“Clearly there were no home runs,” a law enforcement source said.

Investigators are now focusing on working with scientists to determine the genetic code of the anthrax used in the attacks in an attempt to link it to a specific laboratory, law enforcement sources said.  In addition, investigators are also reinterviewing people, the Post reported (Lengel/Gugliotta, Washington Post, Aug. 1).

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