Steve Quayle News Alerts

August 6, 2003
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Most hospitals in big cities are not ready to care for the victims who would pour in after a major biological attack, an official U.S. government study found on Wednesday.

The General Accounting Office report echoes a number of others that show the country is not geared up to deal with a large attack or incident.

"While most urban hospitals across the country reported participating in basic planning and coordination activities for bioterrorism response, they did not have the medical equipment to handle the number of patients that would be likely to result from a bioterrorist incident," the GAO report reads.

The GAO, the investigational arm of Congress, surveyed more than 2,000 hospitals for its study, published on the Internet at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03924.pdf.

Federal, state and local officials worry that hospitals lack "surge capacity."

"For example, these officials are concerned that this surge in patients would be likely to overwhelm emergency departments in urban areas, many of which are already operating at or above capacity," the report said.

One key piece of medical equipment is a ventilator, which can be used to keep patients alive while their body battles a severe respiratory disease. But the GAO found that one-third of all hospitals had no more than five ventilators and another 40 percent had fewer than 10.

With the Sept. 11 hijacked plane assaults exposing U.S. vulnerability to a terror strike, several exercises have shown just how terrible a biological attack could be.

One, called TOPOFF 2000 (for top officials), simulated the release of pneumonic plague bacteria at a single public event. By the third day, 500 people were sick and taking antibiotics and ventilator shortages were already beginning.

"In the early stages of the (simulated) epidemic, hospitals were seeing two to three times their normal volume of patients and later in the exercise 10 times normal volumes were arriving at hospitals," the GAO said.

In the exercise, hospitals lacked the needed isolation facilities so the disease spread to staff -- something that recently happened in real life in the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed 800 people and sickened 8,000 from November last year through May.

SARS illustrates how hospitals also need this capacity for naturally occurring epidemics, the GAO said.

The GAO noted that many groups are aware of the problem and trying to do something about it.

"For example, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations released a report in 2003 on strategies for creating and sustaining communitywide preparedness," the report reads.

"The federal government has also provided assistance for improving the bioterrorism preparedness of hospitals," it added. This includes $125 million from the Health and Human Services Department in grants that hospitals could compete for.

"In addition, the federal government has established a stockpile of pharmaceuticals, antidotes and medical supplies that can be delivered to the site of a bioterrorist (or other) attack," the report said.

"Most hospitals, however, still lack equipment, medical stockpiles and quarantine and isolation facilities for even a small-scale response."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N06370412.htm