States still striving to meet preparedness goals.

EMERGENCY management; BIOTERRORISM; PUBLIC finance; PUBLIC health; HEARNE, Shelley

This paper deals with the continued struggle of U.S. states to improve their bioterrorism preparedness capabilities since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks according to a December 2004 report. It found that although a surge in federal dollars has yielded many improvements, some basic mechanisms are still not in place. With shifts and decreases in funding, a lack of well-defined performance indicators as well as gaps in legal authorities, it is clear that preparedness has not been a national priority, according to Shelley Hearne, executive director of Trust for America's Health, which created the report. As part of the problem is a lack of measurable data, Trust for America's Health developed 10 key indicators--such as funding, laboratory capacity and communications--and scored states on a one-to-10 scale depending on the number of indicators achieved. The report also found that only six states are prepared to distribute vaccines during an emergency, only five public health laboratories are equipped to respond to chemical terrorism, two-thirds of states do not electronically track disease outbreaks, 20 states have no publicly available flu pandemic plan and about 60 percent of states report not having enough laboratory scientists. According to Hearne, nearly one-third of states have cut their public health budgets from 2003 to 2004 and in 2004, each state was hit with a more than $1 million decrease in its federal bioterrorism funding.