US struggles to ensure funds aid fight against bioterrorism

WASHINGTON -- More than five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government cannot show how the $5 billion given to public health departments has better prepared the country for a bioterrorism attack or flu pandemic.

Congress responded to the 2001 strikes and anthrax-tainted letters sent to lawmakers by putting much more money toward emergency preparedness. State health departments typically get tens of millions of dollars per year to prepare for bioterrorism; it was in the hundreds of thousands before Sept. 11, 2001.

The money came with a catch: Washington had to set criteria to evaluate how well the dollars were spent. That assignment fell to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has struggled with the task.

"We're not able to demonstrate accountability," said Craig Thomas, chief of the CDC office that evaluates and monitors public health departments. "It's not just accountability to the CDC. It's accountability to your community. It's accountability to your local stakeholders and the people who fund you as well."

Thomas addressed public health leaders at a recent conference in Washington. His assessment does not mean local departments have squandered the money. Indeed, health officials say the departments are much better able to respond to major threats than they were five to 10 years ago.

It is, however, an acknowledgment that the CDC relies on anecdotal evidence to demonstrate the improvement. Congress demanded hard, statistical evidence.

The government began awarding money for bioterrorism preparedness in 1999, sending $40.7 million to the states. In 2002, the total jumped to $950 million.

The government also has increased spending on research at the National Institutes of Health and for improving the capabilities of hospitals and first responders.

Health departments used federal grants to stock up on antivirals, buy needles and syringes, and hire more doctors and nurses. One of the most important upgrades came in disease surveillance.

In Michigan, emergency room workers plug the symptoms of some 6 million visitors each year into a huge computer database. A spike in nausea may indicate that a certain food product -- spinach, for example -- has been tainted with E. coli.

"Sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes, the Super Bowl happened and you had more headaches the next day. Sometimes it's worth looking into, and they can discover a new outbreak," said Dr. JoLynn Montgomery, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at the University of Michigan.

The challenge for the CDC is how to measure Michigan's improved ability to respond to bioterrorism or other such health threats?

An initial list of 100 benchmarks, drafted in 2003, has shrunk to the 23 that were used last year.

States are asked such things as how long it takes:

To get a "knowledgeable public health professional" to respond to an urgent call.

To ship a specimen to a laboratory.

To begin an epidemiological investigation of an event that may be of urgent health consequence .

CDC officials point to two reasons for the lag in developing the measures.

For one, the CDC is a scientific organization. It makes recommendations based on scientific data, but such data do not exist when it comes to showing which steps taken by health officials would bring about the best result during a particular emergency.

Also, the agency had difficulty getting health departments to agree about what the government should measure.

"Every health department is different, so where one may have strengths and they feel very confident in measuring something, another may have that as a weakness and feel less confident," said Donna Knutson, a CDC senior adviser.