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CQ HEALTHBEAT NEWS
July 23, 2007 – 7:09 p.m.

U.S. Biosecurity Efforts Need More Development
By Lauren Phillips, CQ Staff

Security agents said Monday that border biosecurity in the United States needs significant development, including increasing resources and education as well as more coordination between responsible agencies.

In a briefing on Capitol Hill, Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), and James Hodge, executive director of the Center for Law and the Public’s Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, addressed recent threats to U.S. border biosecurity, ways to control diseases entering the country and measures the government can take to quarantine people who have a disease gaining access to U.S. points of entry.

At the event, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy, Benjamin said the next steps to prevent threats from diseases such as tuberculosis, SARS and ebola include increased resources and support for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), support for education between various agencies including CDC, border protection patrols and others, and introducing advanced technology after first increasing the effectiveness of the staff monitoring border biosecurity.

“The goal is to keep diseases from spreading,” Benjamin said.

Currently, about 425 million people enter the country through about 474 points of entry. There are 20 quarantine stations in the United States, mostly on the coasts and Mexican and Canadian borders, manned by about 133 people. This is less than in 1963, Benjamin said, when there were no threats of bioterrorism but less than half the number of points of entry, only a few million people entering the country, and 55 stations with 600 people — 4.5 times as many people than current stations staff.

The core of protection against infectious diseases in the United States comprises the 20 quarantine stations, the Department of Global Migration and Quarantine headquarters and the CDC, which manages risk and coordinates with the rest of the government infrastructure. Other agencies that work to bolster the country against diseases includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Association, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

Benjamin said the relationship between many departments right now is informal, developed through years of working together, and it is those relationships that allow the system to work. “The challenge, as we age out, is that we won’t have this informal working relationship,” Benjamin said. “We need to formalize this.”

He suggested methods such as holding drills across all the protective agencies and practicing emergency scenarios.

Hodge said it is important that actors in the various departments know the full gamut of their legal authority and the full ramification of what that legal authority is. What he doesn’t like to see, he said, is a sense that it is okay to disregard the law in emergency situations, or not knowing when to act that would prevent actions to protect the public health.

Benjamin said it also is important to not overreact. “If you quarantine more people than necessary, this significantly reduces your credibility,” he said.

Hodge said there are five major legal challenges to handling public safety concerns, including a specification and nationalization of public health agencies, balancing those challenges with states’ rights and national security concerns, examining globalization and global health responses and protecting public safety versus individual interests.

Both Hodge and Benjamin said there is a delicate balance around protecting due process of law and public safety. “It is important to recognize in the concept of sequestering people for quarantine or isolation as an attempt to control communicable diseases [that] we try to balance the public good against civil liberties,” Benjamin said. “And the key question we want to certainly ask when trying to decide on this issue of isolation or quarantine is, ‘Is this going to make a difference,’ from a public health perspective?”

Article: http://public.cq.com/docs/hb/hbnews110-000002556699.html