Posted on 12/30/2003 10:15:59 PM PST by FairOpinion
TORONTO (CP) - Thank God it was only a simulation.
A multi-country bioterrorism exercise held earlier this year highlighted critical weaknesses in intergovernmental communications capabilities and national response capacities, a report on a mock smallpox attack reveals.
The sheer volume of e-mail traffic generated during Exercise Global Mercury caused a crucial Canadian server to crash, putting it out of commission for four hours. Teams from France and Mexico ran smack up against a language barrier. And despite repeated efforts, no one was able to mount a single all-party conference call in which all players could communicate.
"Information overload was a reality of the exercise," noted the report, obtained under the Access to Information Act.
Still, Health Canada - which took the lead role - deems the simulation a success and says the seven other countries and two institutions - the European Commission and the World Health Organization - do as well.
The director general of Health Canada's Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response said the exercise was designed to assess how participating countries would be able to communicate with each other and co-ordinate responses if a smallpox attack were to occur.
"I was kind of encouraged. Because by doing this exercise and by really extracting some real clear, concrete lessons, I think it gives everybody a little purpose and a sense of direction on where to go and what to try to improve on," Dr. Ron St. John said in an interview Tuesday.
"Yes, there were things that could be done better. And now we all have an idea of what they might be. And we can go forward and try to fix those things."
A WHO spokesman concurred.
"It was a useful exercise. Many lessons were learned and they're being incorporated as we upgrade our systems now," said Dick Thompson, communications director for the Geneva-based body's communicable diseases branch.
The scenario for the simulated attack revolved around terrorists deliberately infecting themselves with smallpox, then travelling to different parts of the globe to spread the deadly disease. The exercise began with an infected terrorist arriving by plane at Vancouver International Airport.
The exercise was conducted over a 56-hour period between Sept. 8 and 10, with that period representing 12 days in real time. Organizers ended the simulation at 44 hours, declaring that all the goals of the exercise had been met.
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Britain and the United States took part in the exercise.
Participating countries were expecting to find problems - and they did.
Hours before the exercise started, countries realized they didn't have a master list of emergency contact numbers for each other.
"Well, there was a bit of a flurry of e-mails . . . in the eight or 10 hours before the exercise," St. John admitted, adding Canada is now finalizing an international emergency contacts database.
The Canadian players held off informing other teams of the suspected smallpox case until they had received test results from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. In exercise time, they waited three days to warn partners they feared they were seeing a bioterrorism attack - a decision partners later criticized.
When communications worked, terminology tripped up participants, who appeared to give different interpretations to terms such as "probable," "suspect" and "confirmed" cases.
Language problems exacerbated the difficulties; France admitted it had difficulty finding enough English-speakers to man its team round-the-clock.
Another common problem was that national response plans appeared to pay scant attention to international ramifications of a smallpox attack, a point noted by the European Commission team in its evaluation of the exercise.
"The international aspects of national measures taken were seldom, if ever, discussed."
St. John said post-exercise debriefings have identified that as an area all participants need to work on.
"The team in that country began to pay a huge amount of attention to their problem in their country and they began to sort of drift away from the international ramifications," he said.
"One of the recommendations coming out of the exercise was for each country to review their national plan and to give some thought to making sure the international part is not lost."
The report does not say how many people would have been infected with smallpox, given the scenario and the reaction times of the countries involved in the exercise.
"That's hard to say. I hesitate to speculate," St. John said when asked.
The simulation was expressly designed to focus exclusively on the communications structures, he said, adding that having too many elements to evaluate could have overwhelmed the exercise.
The scenario for the simulated attack revolved around terrorists deliberately infecting themselves with smallpox, then travelling to different parts of the globe to spread the deadly disease. The exercise began with an infected terrorist arriving by plane at Vancouver International Airport.
The simulation was expressly designed to focus exclusively on the communications structures, he said, adding that having too many elements to evaluate could have overwhelmed the exercise. "
And looks like there were really serious gaps and problems.
And suppose terrorists don't travel as one or two infected ones spreading smallpox, but release airosolized version at airports and malls and hundreds or even thousands of people get it simultaneously.
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