Michael S. Ascher, MD is one of the individuals within the California Dept of Health Services (DHS) involved in orchestrating DHS’s atrocious policies re: Lyme disease. Upon information and belief, Ascher is also the point person for the bioterrorism program within DHS that is reportedly being funded by the DOD. Dr. Ascher is active duty military and worked at Fort Detrick (U.S.  Army biowarfare research center) prior to taking his current position with California DHS approximately a decade ago.

Assistant Secretary of HHS, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, states in the article below: “The danger is we don’t want public health identified with the CIA and FBI activities . . . Particularly in terms of global infectious disease surveillance. We in public health need to have public trust and confidence - it’s crucially important. We have to find the right balance.”

What is Hamburg saying here? That we don’t want the CIA and FBI to be KNOWN to be involved in public health, implying that they are already positioned within our public health system? -- or is she saying that we don’t want them involved and that civilian medicine and civilian public health employees should be and will be undertaking this work?

Wake-Up Call On Germ Warfare / U.S. and Canada fail mock attack

( Newsday ) Laurie Garrett; 02-21-1999

Wake-Up Call On Germ Warfare / U.S. and Canada fail mock attack

By Laurie Garrett. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Washington, D.C. - Public health infrastructures in the United States and Canada would, in their current states, be devastated by a “high-impact” bioterrorism event in which an attacker uses modern germ technology, officials said last week.

A telltale scenario - role-played by public health experts using smallpox as the biological agent involved and epidemic response plans similar to those in many American cities - left 15,000 people dead over two months and 80 million dead within a year, primarily due to insufficient global vaccine supplies.

“We blew it,” said Dr. Michael Ascher, a California health official, one of a number of experts asked to make decisions as the scenario played out. “It clearly got out of control. Whatever planning we had . .  . it didn’t work. I think this is the harsh reality, what would happen.”

The scenario was explored this week in a daylong exercise attended by more than 1,000 public health leaders from both countries, part of a two-day seminar on the issue organized by experts from the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The seminar came just weeks after President Bill Clinton announced that $158 million was being allocated to the Department of Health and Human Services this year for research and preparedness in bioterrorism defense and that Congress would be asked for $230 million next year.

One of the first expenditures  is for a stockpile of vaccines and treatments that communities could get quickly, Donna Shalala, the HHS secretary, has said.

The scenario involved a visit by the American vice president to a northeastern university on April 1. Eleven days later, a 20-year-old student who heard the vice president speak shows up in the university hospital’s emergency room with flu-like symptoms, including high fever, muscle aches, fatigue and a headache.

Under the scenario, the student is sent home with aspirin and told to rest and drink lots of fluids.

Two days later, the young woman returns to the hospital, now fighting for her life. And a university janitor who cleaned up after the vice president’s speech displays the same symptoms. By 6 o’clock that night, April 13, the hospital infectious diseases expert is ready to voice an outrageous conclusion: Both patients have smallpox, which can be spread through the air and kill a third of those it infects.

Since smallpox was officially eradicated in 1977, with only a few samples under lock and key in Atlanta and Siberia, there  is one conclusion: Someone gained access to those samples and released the virus in an attack aimed at the vice president.

By June 15, more than 15,000 people would have died of smallpox worldwide under the scenario, which uses growth rates from historic epidemics as a model. And the disease would be out of control in 14 nations, as travelers spread it by using modern-day transportation. Also by then, the experts concluded, virtually all global vaccine supplies would be depleted.

As the scenario continued to unfold, other nations  would decide to close their borders, barring Americans from entering their countries.  And in the affected city, the National Guard would impose martial law over 2 million residents.

The final tally? Top experts say such an attack could, theoretically, kill 80 million people worldwide within 12 months.

“We would be irresponsible if we didn’t remedy this,” Jerome Hauer, New York City’s chief of emergency responses, said in reaction to the scenario. “We’ve got to move this [planning] forward.”

“The whole fabric of democracy would fall apart,” added former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, who also played a role in the scenario. “It is a disaster.”

In choosing smallpox as the lethal microbe, the Johns Hopkins experts opted for a worst case test. Vaccination for smallpox stopped in North America in 1972 and globally in 1977.

Only 7 million doses of stockpiled smallpox vaccine remain in the United States. Less than 10 percent of those who were vaccinated still have ample immunity against the virus to protect them, said Dr. D. A.  Henderson of Johns Hopkins. And, of course, no one born after 1971 in the United States has been vaccinated.

Other, less awesome microbial threats, such as the bacteria anthrax, tularemia and brucella, also worried those gathered at the Washington meeting.

“We have a lot of work to do . . ,” said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, an assistant HHS secretary. “Having been the health commissioner of New York City during the World Trade Center bombing, I have no doubt that terrorism is a reality . . . I have no doubt that if we want to be responsible we have to take this seriously.”

Already HHS and local health departments are facing a deluge of hoax attacks, typically threatening release or claiming to have posted an anthrax-releasing device.

Jessica Stern of the Council on Foreign Relations said she has compiled details of 47 such anthrax hoaxes since 1992 in the United States, three of which occurred in New York State (Lackawanna, Rochester and Cheektowaga).

In most cases the hoaxes were limited to notes claiming, “You have been exposed to anthrax,” often directed at racially or anti-semitically inspired targets or abortion clinics. But authorities took the threats seriously: They have conducted full decontamination of some 2,000 people connected to those 47 incidents, brought containment-suited emergency personnel to the sites and often created genuine local panic.

Earlier this month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued recommendations for handling bioweapons hoaxes, suggesting that authorities try to visually downplay their responses so as not to encourage thrill-seeking, malevolent individuals.

“When an envelope comes in saying, ‘This is anthrax,’ we don’t need the fire department in full protective gear on site,” Hamburg said in an interview. “What we need is to discreetly move the envelope to a laboratory for appropriate analysis.”

Hamburg’s office is trying to develop clear hoax guidelines, forge stronger links between public health and law enforcement agencies and encourage research and development of a national stockpile of appropriate vaccines and antibiotics.

“The danger is we don’t want public health identified with the CIA and FBI activities,” Hamburg continued. “Particularly in terms of global infectious disease surveillance. We in public health need to have public trust and confidence - it’s crucially important. We have to find the right balance.”

In such a scenario it is highly unlikely the terrorists responsible for global mass homicide would ever be caught anyway, said Robert Blitzer, retired FBI chief of counterterrorism. “It’s very slim” odds, Blitzer said, that anyone would claim credit for such a dastardly deed or leave an easy trail of clues that might allow them to be quickly tracked down.

“[The planning process] is a work in progress,” Hamburg concluded.

Laurie Garrett, Wake-Up Call On Germ Warfare / U.S. and Canada fail mock attack. , Newsday, 02-21-1999, pp A04.

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http://www.house.gov/reform/hearings/healthcare/00.10.03/accountability.doc

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