A First Step on U.S. Biodefense

July 14, 2002; Page A10

Nine months after the most serious outbreak of biological warfare in U.S. history, the United States has taken its first tentative steps toward biodefense readiness, but experts say it will take years for the nation to build a robust system after decades of neglect.

The first post-Sept. 11 trickle of federal funds devoted strictly to biological warfare defense began last month, when the Department of Health and Human Services started distributing $1.1 billion to states and some cities to upgrade community public health preparedness.

It is a startup program, aimed at attacking the basic weakness of U.S. biodefenses by requiring communities to begin developing infrastructure, including chains of command, response patterns, and communications, a condition of receiving their share of the payout.

"This is only the first year, and in this context, it's going to take maybe five years to build the systems and capacity," said Thomas Milne, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials. "What we'll get this year is an increment of improvement, not preparedness. Not yet."

Besides the HHS money, the centerpieces of national biodefense include a plan to shift $1.9 billion in research funds from the National Institutes of Health to a new Department of Homeland Security, and a new $420 million program to transform four urban areas -- including metropolitan Washington -- into state-of-the-art showcases for the best in biodefense.

The NIH plan in particular is controversial, and the fate of all the programs depends on both the 2003 budget that Congress eventually passes and the way bureaucratic lines of authority are redrawn in the proposed Department of Homeland Security.

President Bush in February announced a $5.9 billion biological warfare defense budget for 2003, on top of $2.5 billion in new money made available in an emergency spending bill passed by Congress in January.

But nine months after the mail-borne anthrax attacks killed five people, officials in most parts of the country are only beginning to grapple with a threat that until recently was regarded as little more than a highly hypothetical what-if.

"We have practice with explosions or chemical spills," said epidemiologist Donald A. Henderson, principal science adviser for public health preparedness at HHS. "The biological has been more difficult because of the misapprehension that you could deal with it the same way as a chemical incident, when, in fact, these events could not be any more dissimilar."

In ramping up the nation's biodefenses, no part of the country has gotten more attention than metropolitan Washington. Besides its share of the HHS money, the region in January received a $292 million congressional appropriation to upgrade emergency preparedness, and is slated to get $85 million more in 2003. In all, greater Washington could receive about $400 million in federal emergency preparedness and biodefense funds in 2002 and 2003.

By Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writer
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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