How prepared is the U.S. for a bioterror attack?

A ringing telephone startled Tom Slezak from a sound sleep. It was 1 a.m. on 6 October 2001. The caller gave Slezak three hours to pack for a chilling, top-secret mission: to protect Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities from a major bioterror attack.

For all Slezak knew, an attack had begun. Hours earlier, a Florida photo editor named Bob Stevens had died after inhaling anthrax powder sent by mail, jolting a nation that was still reeling from the 9/11 hijackings. At the time, the scope of the anthrax attacks that eventually killed five people and sickened 17 others wasn’t clear.

USA Today’s Steve Sternberg writes that Slezak got the call because he helped pioneer the genetic analysis of biological agents at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Today, eight years after the anthrax attacks, the system Slezak’s research team started, known as BioWatch, is quietly operating in more than thirty cities.

A federally funded, locally run program with an $80 million annual budget, it depends on a network of vacuum pumps that draw surrounding air through filters, sniffing for signs of biological agents.

Sternberg writes that the pumps’ precise locations are secret, but they are in high-traffic destinations such as subway stations and where prevailing winds might carry a toxic plume. Each day, technicians retrieve their filters and carry them to public health laboratories, where scientists test for the genetic fingerprints of a top-secret list of biological threats.

Officials say the program has made the United States better prepared for a biological attack — but it also has vulnerabilities, acknowledges Robert Hooks, a deputy assistant secretary at the DHS Office of Health Affairs who now oversees the program for DHS.

Because the filters are collected as infrequently as once a day, a terrorist could release anthrax, plague, or smallpox in a U.S. city and it might take 12 to 36 hours for anyone to find out. If the agent were anthrax, public health officials would have as few as 12 hours to confirm the attack, try to map its scope and dispense antibiotics to thousands, or tens of thousands, of people. Inhaled anthrax is nearly always fatal if people who are exposed to it go 72 hours without treatment, Hooks says.

Given the likelihood of delays, some critics question the need for BioWatch. They say the government’s focus should be on a tighter public health surveillance network that could detect any