Word: anthrax
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That perception changed dramatically after Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks. Suddenly, vaccines were back in the headlines. The U.S. government was scrambling to build up its supplies of smallpox inoculations, and an anthrax vaccine that had been stuck in a legal and scientific morass for years was thrust back on the fast track...
...system still does many things well, but how serious its shortcomings have become was made abundantly clear last fall, the moment the first anthrax case surfaced. The government did a passable job of controlling the anthrax spores but a terrible job of dispensing medical advice. Frozen in the bright lights of the 24-hour news cycle, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge often looked flummoxed and misinformed, learning medicine on the go and winging it when they didn't know. It was a sharp contrast to the celebrated performance of former New York...
Under Thompson and Ridge, bad--and sometimes fatal--decisions were made. The U.S. government allowed postal workers to continue breathing the air of a sorting facility filled with anthrax spores; it went tearing off to stock up on Cipro when many scientists believed it unnecessary and even dangerous; it wrung its hands about whether to order 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine--sowing its own kind of terror with its very indecision; and it allowed open speculation about quarantines to spread unchecked, without a clear consensus on the extent of its legal powers to impose them in the first place...
Nobody ever said that protecting the public's health was an easy job--whether it's being done quietly and invisibly in peaceful times, or hurriedly and worriedly in the glare of media attention. But experts agree that the weaknesses exposed in the wake of the anthrax attacks must be fixed--and in such a way that a newly nimble system can handle both the sudden emergency and the everyday job of fostering national wellness. "For the last 20 years we've neglected public health," says Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, the Senate's only physician. The terrorist attacks have "shocked...
...biggest problem, as it so often is, is money. The dry rot at the CDC labs in Atlanta--where leaky walls are repaired with duct tape and a sputtering power system caused a blackout during the height of anthrax testing last fall--is only the most conspicuous part of the problem. Funding throughout the agency is so meager that members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service--a sort of disease SWAT team--cannot afford even such basic field equipment as two-way pagers...