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.

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.

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.

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.

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.