Medicine Delivery in Cities After Potential Terrorist Attack

From the Nuclear Threat Initiative website Monday, February 7, 2005 issue.

Experts Question Federal Initiative for Medicine Delivery in Cities After Potential Terrorist Attack

The Bush administration is pressing 21 U.S. cities to develop plans for door-do-door delivery of medicines in case of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, May 21, 2004).

The $27 million Cities Readiness Initiative, an eight-month pilot program announced by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department in May 2004, designated $12 million for the U.S. Postal Service to recruit and train volunteer carriers to deliver drugs from the strategic national stockpile following a possible WMD event.

The initiative partly arises from fears of an anthrax attack, said William Raub, a Health and Human Services emergency preparedness official.

“There are chemicals of a very similar nature sprayed over entire national forests to kill gypsy moths,” he said. “We now realize that an outdoor anthrax release over a city would not be difficult at all.”
New York and 10 other cities have expressed interest in the postal worker plan, according to the Times, but city officials and U.S. Postal Service representatives are still discussing details of such an effort.

“Postal carriers signed up to carry the mail in times of rain, sleet or snow, not anthrax,” said David Heyman, a bioterrorism specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If there are questions of whether medical personnel would even show up to work under such conditions, it’s certainly not clear that postal carriers would.”

Studies conducted by the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University predict that about 35 percent of New York hospital employees would stay away from work following a biological or radiological attack.

Concerns about home delivery include possible theft of medicine from mailboxes and whether people would even be there when the drugs arrived, the Times reported.

“Estimates indicate that about a third of the population would follow orders if told to shelter in place, a third would head for the hills, and a third would hang around to help mobilize relief efforts,” said Stephen Prior, the director of the National Security Health Policy Center at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. “But these are the types of variables that we have to start figuring out”

(Ian Urbina, New York Times, Feb. 7).