Smallpox Simulation Indicates Lack of Preparedness
A smallpox attack exercise conducted Friday in Washington resulted in a largely ineffective response by participants, the Los Angeles Times reported (see GSN, Jan. 5).
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – playing the role of president of the United States – and 11 senior European diplomats and politicians playing other heads of state struggled for seven hours with a tabletop exercise designed to educate officials about the increasing danger of bioterrorism.
"The scenario we posited is very conservative," Tara O'Toole, head of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said following the privately funded $250,000 session.ø"This could have been much worse.ø The age of engineered biological weapons is here.øIt is now."
The exercise, named Atlantic Storm, posed a scenario in which vaccinated terrorists spread dried smallpox at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany; in subway systems in Warsaw, Poland and Rotterdam, the Netherlands; at New York's Pennsylvania Station and Los Angeles International Airport; and at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey.
Within hours, authorities had confirmed 3,320 cases of smallpox and warned that the infection could spread to up to 660,000 people.
The leaders argued about whether to share their own national supplies of smallpox vaccine and whether to conduct targeted inoculations of health workers and probable victims or prepare mass vaccinations.øThey also disagreed over which international institutions ought to lead the response, the Times reported.
Those are the probable difficulties real leaders would encounter in the face of a real smallpox attack, according to the Times.
"Fortunately, we are not prime ministers anymore," said Jerzy Buzek, who was Poland's prime minister during the Sept. 11 attacks and returned to the position for a day during the exercise.
"Nobody is ready," he added (Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 17).
