Homeland Insecurity

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At CDC headquarters, cots were set up and meals were brought in to make researchers more comfortable as they worked around the clock. Eighty people arrived at a Staten Island, N.Y., hospital fearing they had been exposed on a ferry. "It was a mob mentality," a doctor said. Clinicians tried to reason with people, explaining that their odds of being hit by a car while running to the ER are far greater than their chances of contracting anthrax. "We've been testing a lot of Sweet'N Low, drywall dust, sugar and talcum powder," said Kathy Barton, chief of public affairs for Houston's department of health and human services. "When we think we get the public calmed down, something else cracks down in Washington or New York and it heats up again."

In Washington the consensus was that public-health officials were equipped to handle a couple of dozen cases of anthrax spread by envelope but not a couple of million spread by a crop duster. A 1993 report by the now-defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment showed that a broad dispersal of anthrax spores over a major city could cause 3 million casualties. Another report estimated that a smallpox release could kill 40 million. But Bush's budget this year allocated just $345 million for bioterrorism preparedness. Congress had passed legislation asking for $1.4 billion, and now that number is considered too low. Last week Thompson publicly asked for an extra $1.5 billion, and the final number could be more than three times that. The money would be used to boost drug stockpiles, train local health workers to respond to an emergency and improve the testing facilities at labs. Many today have no fax machine, let alone a computer link to the CDC.

It's the nature of terror that by the time we have fixed our defenses and pulled up the drawbridge, our adversaries may have tunneled in elsewhere. Some officials last week who watched the frenzied response to the anthrax assault wondered privately whether it was really the second wave that the FBI warned of or a clever diversion from something far worse to come. In this view we were lucky to be tested by anthrax: it isn't contagious, it dissipates in air, it is easily treated, and it even leaves fingerprints for you to trace. If its appearance has made us more conscious and cautious about bioterrorism, it came not a moment too soon.

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