Experts say U.S. vulnerable to bioterrorism

WASHINGTON — Experts have warned that the United States is vulnerable to bioterrorist attacks as the Pentagon has reduced allocations for an inoculation program for soldiers.

The experts told a conference on bioterrorism that not enough funds are being invested in defense against bioterrorist attacks. They said that part of the $13 billion allocated for developing defenses against weapons of mass destruction ended up in political programs.

Speakers at the conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore pointed to a May exercise called Topoff, a simulation of simultaneous chemical weapons attack in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a plague in Denver and a nuclear attack in Washington. The simulation demonstrated bureaucratic chaos as officials argued over authority and hospitals were overwhelmed.

The result was an assessment that hundreds of people would have died.

"Be paranoid," George Poste, chief executive officer of Health Technology Networks, a health care consulting group in Scottsdale, Arizona, told the conference. "We are vulnerable."

The experts said the good news was that United States and other nations understand that governments or extremist groups could easily produce anthrax or smallpox for terrorist attacks. But the bad news is that these nations have done little in response.

Last month, President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill that is meant to help health authorities cope with the threat of a biological weapons attack.

On Thursday, the Pentagon announced additional cuts in a program to inoculate U.S. military personnel against anthrax amid dwindling supplies of the vaccine. Officials said the vaccine would be used only for troops heading for the Gulf as Iraq is regarded as a country that could use chemical and biological weapons.

"In my judgment, Washington, if not the nation, is past the level of consciousness-raising," Richard Falkenrath, an expert in defense preparedness at Harvard University, said. "Now we are getting down to the serious and much more difficult process of building a [response] system. [But] U.S. biodefence is disorganized and excessively fragmented."

Officials acknowledged that authorities were way behind in plans to respond to a nonconventional attack. But they said federal and state authorities are coordinating and have established 81 labs to test for the six leading biological agents considered most likely to be used in an attack. These are plague, tularemia, botulin toxin, smallpox and viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and anthrax.

"We are barely getting started," Dr. Jeff Koplan, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said. "We would like to correct that."