Preparing for Bioterrorism

State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck has more:

Transcript

State health departments, emergency management agencies and doctors throughout the Great Lakes region are re-examining their emergency plans after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. Officials say they need to increase their planning to prepare for a bioterrorist attack. Such an attack could mean the release of deadly diseases into a general population and officials say there’s no way the public health structure could handle such an outbreak right now. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tom Scheck reports…


As the nation tries to recover from the terrorist attacks in Pennsylvania, New York and Washington DC, infectious disease experts are using the tragedies to highlight that the nation’s skies and borders are not the only things the federal government needs to worry about. Those experts say the nation needs to also start preparing for a bioterrorist attack. The University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm is one of the leading experts on infectious disease and bioterrorism in the nation. He says it’s unlikely that a terrorist is equipped at this time to release a deadly disease like anthrax or small pox. But he says the events on Tuesday, September 11th have redefined terrorism in the United States. And he says the country is currently ill equipped to handle a biological outbreak.


“We’re a country right now, that if we have a slight increase of influenza cases in the wintertime we close down our hospitals because we have no excess capacity, we don’t have the health care workers or the beds. Now you tell me, given that backdrop, what it will mean when 250 or 300,000 or 400,000 people suddenly come down with smallpox or anthrax.”


Osterholm says if those biologic agents, or others like them are released in an American city, it could, over time, make thousands of people sick. And he says the highly contagious diseases would rapidly transfer from person to person, making it difficult for doctors and public health officials to contain the outbreak. On top of that, Osterholm says most such diseases wouldn’t show their symptoms for 3 or four days. He says that could stretch the state’s public health departments thin as they try to track down who’s infected and who’s not.


“We run much of public health in this country on what I would call the equivalent of running O’Hare air traffic control tower on tin cans and string. Yet that’s going to be the system that’s going to respond to bioterrorism.”


Osterholm and others are lobbying the federal government to allocate billions of dollars to improve the community response rates of public health and emergency personnel throughout the country. He also says the country needs to start stockpiling vaccines for smallpox and anthrax. Since the last human case of small pox was eradicated in 1979,
Osterholm says officials haven’t seen the need to continue vaccinating against the disease. Anthrax, on the other hand, has a vaccine but can also be treated with antibiotics if the disease is caught early enough.


The threat of a bioterrorist attack is not only worrying public health officials but also the emergency room doctors who will be treating infected patients. In addition to running the risk of contracting the same infections they’re treating, emergency room doctors say the threat of bioterrorism adds to an already busy schedule of treating cuts, gashes and gun shot wounds. Now physicians, like Pat Lilja who works at North Memorial Medical Center in the Twin Cities, say they have to watch out for rare illnesses as well; for instance, rare flu-like cases in the summer.


“You don’t know about it until people three or four or five days later suddenly start coming into hospitals sick. So you don’t have this big, all of a sudden, something’s going on. What you have to rely upon are your hospitals, primarily your emergency departments, to say we’ve seen twenty patients today all with this same problem and we usually see one a month.”


Lilja and other emergency room physicians’ say they’ve been conducting mock drills of biological and chemical disasters to prepare for any outbreaks. But he says the emergency plans at many hospitals are stuck on the dusty shelves of an administrator too worried about a declining budget rather than an event that they think could never occur. That worries Randall Larson, the director of the Anser Institute for Homeland Security in Virginia. He says hospitals need to increase their security and monitoring methods to make sure they catch any outbreak that does occur.


“We mad e a decision in this country that we didn’t want the federal government or the state government running our hospitals. They’re private corporations. Thirty percent of them are in the red today. Fifty percent of our teaching hospitals are in the red. They don’t have time to do the exercises and the training they need to be prepared to respond to a biological or a chemical attack. They got to just keep the doors open and stay out of the red.”


Larsen and others say the new federal office of Homeland Security needs to make bioterrorism a priority in the coming years. He says the FBI, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and doctors need to coordinate their efforts to make sure they respond quickly to a biological or chemical outbreak. He says the responsiveness is just as critical for those who work in public health as the quickness expected from a police officer or a firefighter. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tom Scheck.

Activities May Ease Alzheimer’s Disease (Part 1)

  • This garden at the Family Life Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed specifically to help Alzheimer's patients.

About 19 million Americans have a family member with
Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a diagnosis that can send a family reeling.
For
patients, even simple tasks become increasingly difficult, as the
disease
robs them of their memory. And for families, caring for an Alzheimer’s
patient often becomes a fulltime job. In the first of a two-part
series, the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports new approaches
in Alzheimer’s treatment are offering hope to both patients and their
families:

Alzheimer’s Patients Take Up Gardening (Part 2)

  • Family Life Center founder, Cynthia Longchamps (right), and program participant JoAnn Scott. Longchamps says the sound of this waterfall helps soothe Alzheimer's patients, and its location encourages them to walk farther into the garden.

People have often turned to nature to rejuvenate their spirit –
whether they take a hike in the woods, or just look out the window. Now
there’s a type of therapy that taps into these powers of nature. In the
second of a two-part series, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson visits a "healing garden":

Black Carp Introduction Gets Hooked

States in the Mississippi river basin are protesting a decision by the state of Mississippi to allow a foreign fish to be introduced tocontrol a pest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports… the other states are concerned the fish will escape into the wild and damage the environment:

Transcript

States in the Mississippi River Basin are protesting a decision by the state of Mississippi to

allow a foreign fish to be introduced to control a pest. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester

Graham reports the other states are concerned the fish will escape into the wild and damage the

environment:


If you buy a package of catfish filets at the supermarket or order blackened catfish at your

favorite restaurant, chances are that fish was raised in a farm pond in Mississippi. The state of

Mississippi supplies almost three-fourths of the world’s commercial catfish. It’s a two-billion

dollar a year business, coming in only after cotton and timber as one of Mississippi’s largest

industries.


In recent years, Mississippi farmers have been struggling with a parasite that’s attacking the

catfish. Jimmy Avery is a researcher with the National Warmwater Aquaculture Center at Mississippi

State University. He says the parasite is causing quite a bit of damage.


“It’s either killing these fish outright or it’s stressing them to the point they no longer grow.”


Avery says the parasite makes its home in snails. To get rid of the snails, the Mississippi

Department of Agriculture and commerce has approved introducing an Asian fish called the black

carp. The black carp eats snails and mussels. But, other states are worried that the black carp

will escape the farm ponds and get into the wild. Avery says that’s not likely…


“The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce has decided that through the permit

process, we can minimize this. They’ll know where every black carp is located. They’ll know what

kinds of system they’ve been put in and it felt like that those regulations that had been put in

place are strong enough to prevent that.”


But the State of Missisippi’s assurances don’t convince others. Roger Klosek is the Director of

Conservation at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He studies native mussels.


“If black carp are used to deal with the snail problem, eventually they’ll escape into the main

waterways, and start reproducing. And once they do that, they’ll start feeding on the native

mussel fauna which is one of the last remaining native mussel faunas in the United States and

literally wipe it out.”


Klosek says native mussel populations have already been hurt by another exotic species, the zebra

mussel. He believes the black carp would be the last straw for American freshwater mussels.


“So, somebody’s going to lose and it’s probably better – I know the catfish farmers will hate me

for saying this, but – it’s probably better that they lose a little economically rather than

reduce some of the native fauna to an irretrievable state.”


Some states’ officials agree with Klosek. Bill Bertrand works with the Illinois Department of

Natural Resources fisheries office. He says there’s a history of Asian carp getting loose. The

silver carp, the bighead carp, and the grass carp have already escaped from farm ponds, mostly

from Arkansas where there are few regulations.


“There’s a history of these exotics, imports, escaping into the river system, spreading throughout

the entire river basin system and causing impacts on all the other states in the system. And

Mississippi appears to tend to ignore that fact and go ahead their own merry way, saying ‘Well

we’re doing this because we want to do it and it’s beneficial to us.'”


Bertrand says governors of some of the states along the Mississippi River have sent letters to the

Governor of the State of Mississippi, asking him to stop the use of black carp. Several of the

states intend to ask the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban the importation of the fish. The

federal agency has not yet received that request… but even if the Fish and Wildlife service

found a ban was appropriate, it would take several months to go through the process. Even then, a

ban would not apply to black carp already in the U.S.


Mike Oetker is a fisheries biologist with the Fish and Wildlife service. He says the agency is

trying to play the role of mediator.


“Right now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to work with states and the industry to

try to prevent the problem of the possible release or accidental release of black carp into the

environment. There are several alternatives to black carp where we can use native fish such as the

red ear sunfish or freshwater drum or even big mouth buffalo to do the same type of biological

control that the black carp are doing. And that would give of the ability to kind of circumvent

this problem.”


The catfish farmers in the State of Mississippi say the native fish don’t eat the snails as

quickly as the black carp. The Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce says it will ask

farmers to use chemical treatments first and where native fish will work, they’ll try to use them.

but in the end, the Mississippi agency says it will allow catfish farmers to use black carp when

it appears other methods don’t work.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.


Aquariums Soothe Alzheimer’s Patients

Alzheimer’s patients can present tough challenges to their caregivers.
Often, they won’t sit still long enough to eat, making it hard to get
proper nutrition. And they can be disruptive – yelling, spitting and
shoving. But researchers at Purdue University think they may have found
a simple answer to address these problems… and improve the quality of
life for Alzheimer’s patients. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson explains: