Cache valley prepares for the worst
Residents of Cache Valley looking for a guarantee that biological or chemical terrorist attacks couldn’t occur in the valley may be disappointed.
Nearly everyone in the region who has looked extensively into the possibility echoed what officials on a national level are saying: It is almost impossible to completely defend against such an attack.
Dr. John Bailey, director of the Bear River Health Department, said the issue came down to the allocation of limited funds.
“To achieve 100 percent protection of our municipal water source, for example, we’d have to put an unscalable fence around every water source, and have someone patrol the fence 24-7. The question becomes: ‘At what cost, and how far are you going to go to protect against a very distant possibility?’ We have trouble enough doing core public health services, the day to day things, with the funding we get,” said Bailey.
Bailey said the health department, as part of its day-to-day operations, was already doing many of the things that would prevent a bioterrorism attack, like making sure municipal water systems are secure and monitoring them regularly.
Keith Larsen, an environmental health scientist with Bear River Health, agreed with Bailey that the department is already doing many of the things necessary to foil an attack. Larsen said an attempt to sicken people through the water was unlikely because most water systems – including Cache Valley’s – are fairly secure, are filtered, chlorinated or both, and the amount of toxin or biological agent a terrorist would need to put in the water to have any significant effect on the population would be prohibitive in most cases.
Larsen said he believes Cache Valley has a good emergency response team. He said as part of the hazardous materials (haz mat) team, he has responded to a number of situations, and in fact, the team was pressed into service earlier this week when a suspicious envelope was reported at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seminary at Mountain Crest High School in Hyrum.
Larsen said during one anthrax scare a few years ago, a number of agencies, including the FBI and the Utah Department of Health, worked together quickly to resolve the situation. Larsen also noted that Cache Valley was part of the statewide Health Alert Network, a federally-funded program designed to help various cities and counties notify health officials and respond to any public health emergency as quickly as possible.
“You hope it doesn’t happen, but I suppose it could,” Larsen said. “We’re doing everything we can to prepare for it.”
Larsen’s faith in the system is not always shared by those working on a national level. An article in Time magazine on Oct. 8, quoted a report from the General Accounting Office which said, “… federal bioterrorism defense is so chaotic the agencies can’t even agree which threats to worry about.”
Two particular threats very much in the public eye at the moment are anthrax and smallpox.
Anthrax has received a great deal of media coverage, with news this week that offices at ABC, NBC, CBS and in the U.S. Capitol have been infected with anthrax, and the list of those exposed to the bacteria seems to be growing each day. The sudden appearance of a disease last seen in America in 1976 has spawned countless articles in newspapers and on the Internet, all seeking to provide information to a jittery American public.
Anthrax is a bacteria fairly common in the soil and in livestock throughout the world, although people are very rarely infected. It is often found in its dormant “spore” stage, although once the spore is ingested it reverts to its live bacterial form. Once ingested, anthrax is thought to be fatal to humans not treated with antibiotics in approximately 90 percent of its cases. A vaccination for the bacteria does exist, but is mainly reserved for military personnel in the United States.
Anthrax is not contagious. It is not spread from person to person. One must inhale the spores directly. It can be treated with antibiotics if it is discovered in the early stages of infection. Dr. Ross Smart, director of the veterinary diagnostic laboratory at USU, said one can test positive for exposure to anthrax, but not be infected with the disease. He said people who have tested positive, but don’t have the disease may not have inhaled many spores, or they may not have inhaled the spores all the way into their lungs.
Erick Simmons, a USU graduate working as an intern for Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) in Washington D.C., said his office has been closed while it is being tested for anthrax. He said he couldn’t speak for Craig or anyone else in his office, but that he wasn’t too concerned.
“I’d say the prevailing mood here is ‘Yes, it’s a big deal, but nothing to panic over.'” Simmons said. “I personally haven’t gone to get tested.”
The other biological agent commonly mentioned as a possible bioterrorist weapon is smallpox, which is a highly-contagious virus. Since 1972, Americans have not been inoculated against it. Health officials say the efficacy of the vaccination decreases over time, so even those who were inoculated before 1972 are probably no longer protected. Although the fatality rate for those infected with smallpox is between 25 and 30 percent, it can be spread at an alarming rate.
According to an article on the Center for Disease Control Web site, which is currently devoted almost entirely to bioterrorism, an outbreak in Yugoslavia in 1972 started by just one infected man, led to a situation in which 175 people contracted smallpox and 35 died, 20 million people were vaccinated, and the country was virtually locked down for a couple of weeks. The article goes on to note that the United States (as of 1998) only possessed around 15 million doses of smallpox vaccine. That number is not significantly higher in 2001.
Joseph K. -K. Li, a professor in the biology department, said he was concerned with the possibility of terrorists infecting themselves with a disease and then attempting to spread the disease. Professor Roger Coulombe, director of the graduate program in toxicology for the animal, dairy and veterinary sciences department, agreed with Li.
“Now we know that people are willing and lining up to sacrifice themselves, so you could have a case where a dozen people infected themselves with something like smallpox, and then wandered around public areas,” Coulombe said. “I’m not so worried about a 767 full of people crashing into Logan, but in this age of mobility, if a traveling professor picked up a disease like that, he could very easily come back here and infect others.”
To illustrate the example of something which can be used for both good and evil, Li brought up dynamite, which was created by Alfred Nobel (for whom the Nobel prize is named) with the intention of lessening miners’ work load, and only later was used for destructive purposes.
“When most scientists – ethical scientists – study microbes, our intention is to discover how microbes cause disease so we can prevent or treat disease. Sometimes, people can use that information in the wrong way,” Li said.
He also said scientists are one of the front lines of defense in the war against bioterrorism in that they could provide information to the public and work on early detection systems for deadly germs, among other things.
“Any USU student who’s had Intro to Microbiology could recognize anthrax in the lab,” Li said. “I’m quite sure if my colleagues and I were asked to help, we would do that in any way we could.”
Li said some measures people were taking, such as buying gas masks, would probably not be helpful in the unlikely event of a bioterrorist attack. He said gas masks are only effective if they’re worn prior to any exposure, and in such an attack, it is unlikely people will know they’ve been exposed. He also said the filters on gas masks only worked on certain chemicals, such as mustard gas
, and were completely ineffective against many biological agents.