Faster bioterrorism directive sought
By JEFF NESMITH
Cox News Service
Friday, July 29, 2005
WASHINGTON — The government is moving too slowly to prepare for the possibility that terrorists will attack America with deadly chemicals, diseases or devices that spread radioactive substances, members of a House subcommittee said Thursday.
Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security last year to assess the danger that a wide array of specific biochemical or radiological threats might pose in the hands of terrorists.
But members of a Homeland Security subcommittee examining these threats said determinations have been completed on only four: smallpox, anthrax, botulinum toxin and a radiological or nuclear device.
A declaration by the department that an agent presents a significant threat is supposed to trigger further study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the potential health consequences of the agent and recommend countermeasures to Congress.
John Vitko, director of the chemical and biological countermeasures office at DHS, said the agency expected to have its assessments of 29 agents completed by the end of this year.
"I understand there are 60 potential threats being evaluated," said Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "Why have you done only four?"
Vitko said 40 to 50 experts from various disciplines must be consulted in each of four steps the agency follows in identifying the threats and assessing the ability of terrorist groups to use them.
"We are all very concerned about the pace here," McCaul said after the hearing, adding that he is particularly concerned about the deadly Ebola virus, one of the potential biological agents under review. "We need to speed this process up."
McCaul also complained that grants by the Department of Health and Human Services to support fire departments, police, hospitals and other "first responders" in case of a terrorist attack are being distributed under a formula that short changes the largest states.
"In Texas, we're always dead last on a per capita basis in these kind of grants, along with New York and California," he said.
McCaul and others urged Vitko to step up the pace of the assessments.
He said the grants should be targeted to areas of greatest risk.
Asked by Rep. John Linder, R-Ga., chairman of the subcommittee, if terrorists could use the H5N1 avian influenza virus as a biological weapon, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, said that might be possible, since influenza can easily be genetically engineered and spreads very rapidly.
"But in this case, Mother Nature herself is a very effective terrorist," she added, referring to the fear by many health experts that the "bird flu" now circulating in Asia will evolve into a human disease and cause a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
Gerberding and Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were asked by Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., if scientists could engineer a disease that might kill everyone on Earth.
Shays said that before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a medical scientist testified before another House committee that his greatest fear was that "small group of dedicated scientists could create an altered biological agent that could wipe out humanity as we know it."
"Is that something that concerns you?" Shays asked Gerberding and Fauci.
"You're asking us to imagine the unimaginable," Gerberding replied, adding that the "technical obstacles are relatively trivial."
What would be hard, she said, would be to distribute the engineered microbe in a way "that would bypass our capacity to recognize it and intervene effectively."
But she added: "These are things that we as federal agencies ought to and are imagining all the time . . . to try to stay one step ahead of terrorists in this regard."
Fauci said that although "you can do almost anything with a microbe," it would be "very, very difficult to do that, extremely difficult even in the best laboratories."
He said if a microbe is engineered with goals such as making it resistant to vaccines and antiviral or antibiotic medications, the likelihood is that "you mutate it out of existence."
"It's not impossible, but very, very difficult," he said.
Jeff Nesmith's e-mail address is jeffn(at)coxnews.com
Damn. Thanks for posting that.