With bioterror law, US prepares for worst scenario

"You can imagine jillions of scenarios. There are a lot of bugs out there. What we need to do is some generic things like put in place laws to meet the threats."

Tara O'Toole, staff member at John Hopkins

A model bioterrorism law being distributed to US states and territories would help them prepare for the worst by clearing up a confusing mass of antiquated rules and powers, legal experts said on Tuesday.

Drafted the behest of the Department of Health and Human Services and with the help of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the new law proposes ways to legally quarantine people, confiscate hospitals and get quick information to doctors in case of a bioterror attack.

States being urged to use the law, published on the Internet at http://www.publichealthlaw.net, either as a template or to patch holes in their own measures.

Bioterrorism have long cautioned that the US has no coherent system for dealing with a biological attack, or even for a serious outbreak of infectious disease.

The new law, drafted by a team of experts at Georgetown University Law School and Johns Hopkins University, is meant to create a legal framework so quick repairs can start.

"Current public health laws make us ill-prepared for bioterror or other public health threats," Lawrence Gostin, director of the Center for Law and the Public's Health at Georgetown, told a news conference.

"They are highly antiquated, highly inconsistent from state to state and confusing," Gostin added.

Dr. Tara O'Toole of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies said the current attack had already shown up large holes in the system.

For example, Washington, DC, postal workers felt they were given preventive antibiotics more slowly than workers on Capitol Hill, and New Jersey postal workers were told last Friday that they were at risk but to go to their own doctors instead of getting drugs from the national stockpile.

"We have all tried to get appointments with our doctors late on a Friday afternoon," O'Toole said.

Eventually, New Jersey state troopers were sent to get the needed drugs from a CDC warehouse and help distribute them to concerned and frightened postal workers.

"Imagine how dispersed people would be after a smallpox attack, which after two weeks they still would not know about. ... It poses a very scary scenario," O'Toole said.

"You can imagine jillions of scenarios. There are a lot of bugs out there," she added. "What we need to do is some generic things like put in place laws to meet the threats."

O'Toole the draft law was just one of many steps that need to be urgently taken. There is not even a common network of computers for state and federal agencies to share information, she said.

"It would be nice to be able to detect a disease as it is breaking out," she said. There is no real system to do this now. Few doctors even think of reporting an unusual disease to the authorities but even if they did, there is rarely a place open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and staffed with knowledgeable people for a doctor to speak to.

The National Association of County and City Health Officials, which also cooperated in drafting the model law, said on Tuesday that state and local public health departments need about US$1 billion immediately from the federal government to prepare for a bioterror attack.

The CDC has identified several dozen potential bioterrorism agents, from anthrax to smallpox to the ricin poison taken from castor beans, but Gostin said no single state has all of them on its list of diseases that doctors must report to officials.

The proposed law covers a variety of questions that would arise as law enforcement and public health officials scrambled to deal with, for example, an outbreak of smallpox.