WASHINGTON?Biological terrorism remains a serious threat to America, Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., warned Thursday.
“The risk is real. The risk is increasing. Our vulnerability remains high,” Frist said at a briefing in an office building closed for months following last fall’s anthrax-by-mail attack.
Sidney Taurel, chairman of the drug maker Eli Lilly and Co., called for cooperation among government, academic researchers and the pharmaceutical industry in finding new ways to detect and combat bioterrorism.
“This is not business as usual. This is not politics as usual. This is war,” Taurel said at the briefing on terrorism and community preparedness held in the Hart Senate Office Building.
Frist, a transplant surgeon, said last fall’s anthrax attack “was very successful…and as far as we know this person’s still out there.”
More than 20 people became ill and five died following the mailing of anthrax-tainted letters from New Jersey. Some postal facilities remain closed because of the contamination. No arrests have been made despite a $2.5 million reward offered by the Postal Service and FBI.
Frist told the session that between 11 and 17 countries either have stockpiled biological weapons or have bioweapons programs, including such threats as anthrax, botulinum toxin, tularemia, smallpox, plague and ebola.
Nine out of 10 public health departments in the United States don’t have anyone trained in combatting bioterrorism and as many as one-third lack an Internet connection for fast communications, Frist said.
He noted only a small proportion of imported food is inspected.
Taurel said that in recent years there has been an increase in drug-resistant germs. In addition, he said there has been the emergence of newly discovered diseases such as ebola about which little is known, and there is a growing threat of manmade pathogens.
“Far from gaining control over infectious diseases, we are losing ground,” he said.
The nation has been through a waking nightmare with the anthrax attack, Taurel said, and he fears that as the tragedy fades from the headlines the country will drift back to sleep.
Taurel’s concerns were echoed in the findings of a recent survey released Friday. The report indicates a decrease in fears of terrorist attacks, showing that one in five New Yorkers worries a great deal about a future terrorist attack on their city, compared with about one in seven people living in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.
The survey was described as the first comprehensive look at urban attitudes about terrorism and security in post-Sept. 11 America. It was done by the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston.
Richard Murray, director of the center, concluded that most Americans consider the attacks “a stumbling block, but not something that has really changed the way they live their lives.”
Twenty-two percent of New Yorkers surveyed said they worry a great deal about another attack there. Fourteen percent in Chicago and 13 percent in Los Angeles and Houston worry a lot about the possibility of an attack on their cities.
Outside the nation’s four largest cities, only 5 percent of respondents are fretting about terror in their areas.
The survey found 45 percent of New Yorkers worry very little about future attacks or not at all, compared with more than 50 percent in the three other big cities.
About 400 people in each of the cities were surveyed by telephone between March 31 and April 16. The margin of error was plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.