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A Citizen’s Eye View of Public Preparedness

New Report Examines Challenges Of Dispensing Medicine To Public Immediately After Anthrax Attack, Infectious Disease Outbreak

August 15th, 2008 · No Comments

I attended a fascinating workshop in March held by the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events titled “Dispensing Medical Countermeasures for Public Health Emergencies.” The report on the workshop was released today. It can be ordered through the National Academies Press, and the Executive Summary is available for free download on the Press’ website. The objective of the workshop was ”to review a range of solutions to provide medical countermeasures rapidly to large numbers of people to protect them before or during a public health emergency, such as a bioterrorist attack or infectious disease outbreak.”

This is an issue that is not on the public’s radar, but is very much a front and center concern among the federal, state and local officials I have spoken to. The challenge was highlighted well during the workshop by Dr. Gerald Parker from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as summarized in the report:

Parker noted that the United States is just about to reach the goal of having stockpiled sufficient antibiotics to provide post-exposure prophylaxis for 60 million people for 60 days in the event of an anthrax attack. However Parker continued, if we do not have the mechanisms to get these lifesaving medicines in the hands of Americans after such as attack or multiple attacks within a very short timeframe, we have squandered an opportunity to save lives. 

Parker noted that an analogy can be found in the school buses that ended up underwater in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Those school buses, if harnessed early, could have been used to evacuate thousands of New Orleans citizens out of harm’s way. Instead, this valuable resources was rendered useless. We must ensure that the same does not happen to the resources in our stockpile, said Parker.

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Tags: Biological Terrorism

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