Unprepared

John Mintz and Joby Warrick of The Washington Post present a dismaying and frightening summary of the threat of bioterrorism in their article "U.S. Unprepared Despite Progress."

It's not all that different from the nightmare-scenario articles I was reading two years ago* when I was researching a training manual for the private security company I worked for at the time. The big difference, though, is that two more years have passed and the U.S. is nearly as woefully unprepared to face such threats as it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

That's not good.

The semi-good news is that many of the most-feared and deadliest sorts of bioweapons remain difficult to produce or control and that al-Qaida is probably not capable of using such weapons.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of cheaper, dirtier methods available that al-Qaida would be capable of using. And we remain unprepared for these threats as well:

… terrorists need little expertise to mount a potentially devastating attack on livestock or crops, experts note.

"You don't need to manipulate genetics to spread foot-and-mouth disease in cattle," said David Franz, who headed the military's top biodefense research lab at Fort Detrick, Md. "You can see economic damage that adds up not to millions, but to tens of billions of dollars."

Articles like this one scare me, and for good reason. One of the stranger aspects of life in America these days is the way that public fear is generated, used, harnessed and manipulated, often around phantom menaces like the idea that Saddam Hussein might have bioterror drones with the range of an arctic tern. Yet on subjects like this one — or subjects like the security of ports or chemical plants — legitimate fears are played down lest the public demand the government actually do something to prepare against these frightening threats.

Mintz and Warrick make another grim observation, slightly off-topic and almost in passing:

Local and state health officials say their underfunded agencies … have received inadequate federal funds and guidance on what the states should address in their bioterrorism master plans.

These underfunded agencies receiving inadequate federal funding are further strained by the need to prepare for the threat of biological terrorism. Something's got to give, and that something will inevitably be the part of their mission described in the phrase I replaced with an ellipsis above. Here's the entire sentence:

Local and state health officials say their underfunded agencies, which focus mostly on caring for the poor, have received inadequate federal funds and guidance on what the states should address in their bioterrorism master plans.

See what's coming? The same people who brought you false dichotomies like "jobs vs. the environment" are getting ready to introduce a new one: "security vs. health care for the poor."

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* One of the best articles I found on the subject of preparedness against biological terrorism was by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Discussing the meaning of preparedness, Cordesman wrote:

We can speculate on scenarios, delivery methods and lethality, we can conduct studies and exercises, and we can write doctrine until hell freezes over, but our chances of really being much better than Buffy are simply not that great …

Yes, he means that Buffy. Cordesman uses Joss Whedon's show as an organizing motif in his paper, "Biological Warfare and the 'Buffy Paradigm'" (warning: the link is to a .pdf file).