Knight Ridder – Having defeated the scourges of smallpox, tuberculosis and polio, U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart confidently told Congress in 1969 that it was time to “close the books on infectious diseases.”

Within a few years, U.S. public health research, funding and manpower, especially at the National Institutes of Health, shifted largely from infectious diseases to chronic ones such as cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Federal public hospitals that specialized in infectious diseases closed as the number of infectious disease courses at public health schools were slowly scaled back.

Decades later, as the nation prepares for a potential avian flu outbreak, those policy changes and complacency in the fight against public health threats have helped to make the United States even more vulnerable to a pandemic or bioterrorist attack.
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Wall Street Journal – The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday examined the role Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has played since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to direct funding to drug companies to produce biodefense medicines.
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Reuters – Hospitals are not prepared to handle the patients who would arrive after a disaster or a pandemic, most states have few plans in place for coping, and the federal government has not taken charge of such preparation, according to a report released by Trust for America’s Health.

CIDRAP: Public health preparedness still lagging, group says.
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Forbes – The New York Department of Health has invested in Visual Dx, a computerized database of photographs of smallpox and other diseases in various stages and on different skin types. The system allows clinicians to enter a list of symptoms, medical history and exposure that returns nearly 600 possible diseases, drug reactions or infections with more than 10,000 pictures.
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Associated Press [Archives of Internal Medicine] – Doctors in training misdiagnosed diseases caused by bioterrorism more than half the time on a multiple choice test, but a Web-based training program improved their skills, a study has found.

Original article is here: Archives of Internal Medicine – Ability of Physicians to Diagnose and Manage Illness Due to Category A Bioterrorism Agents.
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Reuters – The current U.S. quarantine system does not do enough to keep out new killer diseases such as avian flu or unknown new bioterrorist threats.
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Associated Press – One health clinic officer told a caller describing botulism symptoms to go back to bed. Another told a caller describing signs of bubonic plague not to worry. And not one of 19 public health clinics surveyed by the RAND Corporation suggested isolating a patient whose face, arms and legs were said to be covered with pustules or other smallpox symptoms.
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Medical News Today – In a recent survey of US medical students, over half of the respondents (57.5 percent) said they are not offered courses or are not sure of their options in bioterrorism or disaster preparedness.
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USA Today – Four years after 9/11, the public health system remains unprepared to respond to a bioterror attack.
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CIDRAP – The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced that $1.33 billion will be available in this year’s round of funding to states to improve preparedness for terrorism and other public health emergencies???One important new wrinkle in the process this year is that the CDC is making an earnest attempt to define preparedness in terms of specific goals and performance capabilities.
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Washington Post – David Ignatius on how vulnerable the US remains to a bioterrorism attack.
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Centers for Disease Control – After the events of September 11, 2001, federal funding for state public health preparedness programs increased from $67 million in fiscal year (FY) 2001 to approximately $1 billion in FY 2002. These funds were intended to support preparedness for and response to terrorism, infectious disease outbreaks, and other public health threats and emergencies. The Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) assessed the impact of funding on epidemiologic capacity, including terrorism preparedness and response, in state health departments in November 2001 and again in May 2004, after distribution of an additional $1 billion in FY 2003. This report describes the results of those assessments, which indicated that increased funding for terrorism preparedness and emergency response has rapidly increased the number of epidemiologists and increased capacity for preparedness at the state level. However, despite the increase in epidemiologists, state public health officials estimate that 192 additional epidemiologists, an increase of 45.3%, are needed nationwide to fully staff terrorism preparedness programs.
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Associated Press – Rural health officials believe they are woefully unprepared to respond to a possible terror attack on food supplies, nuclear power facilities or other targets.
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Associated Press – More than three years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many state health departments are not prepared for a crisis, according to a representative of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Associated Press – Saint Louis University has formulated an online master’s degree program in biosecurity that starts this fall. It’s designed to train leaders to deal with natural and man-made public health disasters.
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Christian Science Monitor – The state has fine-tuned a distribution network for vaccines, notification procedures, and large-scale aid.

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CIDRAP – The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) yesterday issued a lengthy plan to outline and standardize how the federal government will respond to major emergencies ranging from bioterrorism to natural disasters.
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Associated Press – Biological weapons experts, including the scientist who played a big role in eradicating smallpoe experts laud the increased spending government lavished on combatting biological threats in 2004, they sense momentum slowing as public attention and political will wane.
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[The Lancet] – The emergence of bioterrorism as a threat is creating new responsibilities for the medical community and, for the first time in history, is putting physicians at the forefront of managing disaster.
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Associated Press – U.S. states are slowly getting better prepared to handle bioterrorism, but most still do not have statewide response plans and federal funding is declining, according to a new report.
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Associated Press – A bioterroist attack is inevitable, according to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

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Health Central [New England Journal of Medicine] – The ability of the Internet to serve as a sentry against emerging disease outbreaks continues to make its power known.
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ABC – Has US preparedness against a bioterrorist attack improved since 2001? According to many experts, the answer is no.
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Chicago Tribune – Problems producing flu vaccines that raised the specter of a health crisis have highlighted the difficulties facing the U.S. government as it tries to counter terrorists who would attack America with bioweapons.
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New York Times – Judith Miller on how New York City and the FBI have reached an agreement on how future bioterrorism events will be investigated.
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Washington Post – The United States remains woefully unprepared to protect the public against terrorists wielding biological agents despite dramatic increases in biodefense spending by the Bush administration and considerable progress on many fronts, according to government officials and specialists in bioterrorism and public health.
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Associated Press – Efforts to distribute the government’s stockpile of drugs and vaccines in the event of a biological attack would fall short in “the last mile” of distribution to state and local areas, according to a Democratic report critical of the Bush administration.
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American Medical News – This historic approach to infection-control may still have a role today, although the human rights implications are troubling.
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Medical News Today – A new planning guide funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is designed to help communities nationwide make sure that all Americans have needed drugs and vaccines in the event of a natural epidemic or bioterrorist attack.

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Health Central – A study by the New York Academy of Medicine finds many people will ignore terrorism response plans that are being formulated because the plans aren’t taking the public’s attitudes and fears into account.
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Medical News Today – Ten thousand top government officials across the country have now received How to Lead During Bioattacks with the Public’s Trust and Help, a publication of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) that gives decision-makers practical advice on how to handle the dilemmas that can arise in a public health emergency.

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Medical News Today [Biosecurity and Bioterrorism] – African-Americans and Asians are less likely to believe the public health system would respond fairly in a bioterrorist event, a new UCLA study shows.
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CIDRAP – Federal health officials today released a lengthy plan for dealing with the potentially overwhelming threat of an influenza pandemic like those that occurred three times in the last century.

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New York Times – Nearly three years after Sept. 11, and with New York bracing for the Republican National Convention, hospital officials across the city say they still lack much of the important protective clothing, decontamination facilities and essential drug supplies that could be needed to respond to a biological, chemical or nuclear strike.
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The Scientist – When Georgetown University launches its Master of Science in Biohazardous Threat Agents and Emerging Infectious Diseases this fall, it will be the second such degree-granting program in the Washington, DC, area to capitalize on the region’s multiple research institutions, such as the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick and the National Institutes of Health.
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CIDRAP – America’s growing shortage of qualified public health workers could undermine terrorism preparedness, according to a recent report from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO).
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CIDRAP – The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced today it will award a total of $849 million to states, territories, and four major cities in this year’s package of public health preparedness grants.

BiodefenseEducation.org is taking a break and will next be updated Monday, June 28th. See you then!
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CIDRAP – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published a guidebook to help medical examiners and coroners detect and respond to bioterrorism.
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CIDRAP – HHS wishes to shift money originally earmarked to protect states to instead protect cities.
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The Guardian – An easy-to-use colour guide to deliberately released diseases is to be issued to doctors by the British government this week.
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Reuters – The AMA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an education campaign on Wednesday aimed at encouraging doctors, nurses and patients to look more carefully at cases of possible food poisoning.
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[Journal of Medical Internet Research] – Many people already look to the Internet for information during a public health crisis, and information found online can positively influence behavioral responses to such crises. However, the potential of the Internet to convey accurate health information and advice has not yet been realized.
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Eureka Alert [Journal of the American Medical Association] – Better disease reporting information on state health departments’ Web sites could help physicians more quickly and easily determine how, when and where to report infectious diseases that may represent outbreaks or bioterrorism-related events.
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CDC MMWR – Things in public health are improving but there is still a long way to go???
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