Health Data Monitored for Bioterror Warning

The New York Times ^ | January 27, 2003 | WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER

[allsop grey]

To secure early warning of a bioterror attack, the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities, administration officials say.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to lead the multimillion-dollar surveillance effort, which officials expect to become the cornerstone of a national network to spot disease outbreaks by tracking data like doctor reports, emergency room visits and sales of flu medicine. "Our goal is to have a model that any city could pick up and apply," a senior administration official said of the plan.

Officials would not disclose the program's cost or which cities will be involved. But experts say Washington is likely to be one of the eight.

[allsop grey]

Extensive plan to bioterror detection devices to health monitoring network.

[TheErnFormerlyKnownAsBig]

The unblinking eye lives on.

[billbears]

the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities,

To keep a closer watch on the subjects is more like it. Sheesh!! Why don't they just tell us what the government will not do in the name of 'safety'? I'm sure that list is quite short. After reading the full article all I can say is we've got another boondoggle of money spending and power grabbing through information by the government.

Privacy, though a goal, is apparently not yet guaranteed. A Pentagon planning document on the surveillance effort for fiscal 2002 and 2003 said the Defense Department was working to develop "enhanced automated privacy protection ods" that will "assure the anonymity of records accessed by the data monitoring software."

Suuurrre they will. Tell us another one, why don't you? Do they just want to start popping barcodes on us now and save Hillary the trouble of having to push it through in a few years?

Don't get me wrong. The intentions are good, but you know what they say about where roads paved with good intentions lead

[reformedliberal]

This is a knee-jerk reaction, IMHO.

The program as described is fairly standard epidemiology.
International Society for Infectious Diseases,
http://www.isid.org is an example. The government program is more targeted, but how else would you have it done?

Just recently, a young man died (in Iowa, IIRC) from rabies contracted from a bat. Because rabies was not on the ER radar screen, he was treated for encephalitis and it took an autopsy to pinpoint the cause. 53 persons were exposed, but because the diagnosis was general (encephalitis)instead of specific (rabies) the possibility was that if any of these contacts were infected, they could have each infected another group of individuals and caused an epidemic.

We aren't just worried about smallpox and anthrax. There is a range of diseases not usually seen in America that can be weaponized. The initial presenting complaints for many of these match that of flu. Many who rail on about government intrusion would be the first to scream blue murder if a bio attack took place and wasn't immediately spotted and treated.

If anyone has a better method for monitoring possible epidemics, they could always contact the agencies involved and give them the benefit of their insight.

Most reporting medical professionals take great pains to make any medical report anonymous. It is called blinding. BTW, in small communities, it is generally just form over substances, because most of the med staff will recognize the case report. In large cities, this most likely will not happen. The victim's treating physician and insurance carrier will know who they are, but the bureaucrats most likely will not. And given the inefficiency of insurance companies, it could be 2 months or more before the carrier even had the information.

Even the press, when reporting some of the scares that have occured over the past year and a half, elides the name and particulars of the patient, if they even knew them when reporting. Some of that is the fallout from invasion of privacy suits.

Dead people, of course, won't sue.

[Cynderbean]

A little tidbit : In a local newspaper (The Sun : Wheaton IL.) there was an article this past week about how the DuPage Heath Dept. was going to start a sickness alert program called Pro Net. I did a basic Google search on "Pro Net" and found nothing related to an illness reporting program.