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Leroy Richmond still can't believe his luck. In 2001 the postal worker and volunteer safety captain at the U.S. Postal Service's Brentwood facility in Washington, D.C., was among the first to see the bulletin from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention informing the office that two anthrax-dusted letters had passed through his workplace on their way to senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
But even as the 56-year-old father of three hastened around the cavernous building near the Capitol warning coworkers to keep an eye out for suspicious white powder, he never considered that the deadly bacterium might already be germinating in his lungs. "I was keeping everyone on high alert," recalls Richmond, a lanky retiree with a pencil-thin mustache. "Some people looked at me and said, 'Are you all right? You look like you have a cold.' "
When Richmond's wife, Susan, drove him to a local clinic about a week later, he was so weak, she had to help him out of the car. By then, he was struggling to breathe and couldn't even tell the doctor his name. After finding no obvious cause, Richmond's internist almost sent him home with some aspirin. At the last minute, though, the doctor reconsidered and sent him to the hospital, a decision that saved Richmond's life. Even there, it took two sets of X-rays and several examinations before the doctors suspected the truth: Richmond was infected by anthrax. "When you look at it, there was so much confusion," Richmond says. "The biggest reason I'm alive: an act of God."
Now, seven years after the attack, the idea that a heinous act such as this one-which sickened Richmond and 16 others, killed five, and terrorized a nation wholly unprepared and without defense—could go undetected for weeks seems impossible to him. Most Americans would make this assumption. Were such an attack to occur today, Richmond asserts from his home in suburban Virginia, "it would be totally different." The tainted letters would be detected quickly, he believes. Doctors would immediately recognize the symptoms of anthrax infection. If the attack were on a massive scale, rescuers would rush to the scene and decontaminate it. Fatalities would be unlikely.
BIO-INSECURITY
But a special report for Reader's Digest by ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, suggests otherwise. Despite some $48 billion in federal spending on biodefense—including a new nationwide network of research labs and a $1 billion detection system called BioWatch operating in more than 30 cities-the nation may be just as vulnerable to an attack today as it ever was. Indeed, some biodefense experts warn, we may be less safe.
In recent months, government auditors, public health experts, and outside watchdog groups have unearthed a litany of failures and mistakes in the nation's vast and burgeoning bio-defense program. In September, the Partnership for a Secure America, a bipartisan group of leading national-security experts, issued a report stating that the United States remains "dangerously vulnerable" to nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks.
Margaret Hamburg, MD, a former New York City health commissioner and a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, warns that another anthrax attack would likely still be met with "chaos, uncertainty, and delayed and missed diagnoses."
While higher-risk areas such as New York City tend to be further along, in many parts of the country, emergency plans to prepare hospitals for an influx of bioterrorism victims are still in early stages. "Individual hospitals have gotten more prepared," says Tara O'Toole, MD, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who is completing a study on the subject commissioned by Health and Human Services. "But we still aren't able to care for large or sustained increases in patient demand such as you would see during a bioterror attack. We don't have rapid diagnostic tests that say you have anthrax or flu … even though the technology exists."
Frustrated weapons-proliferation experts complain that biodefense programs are haphazard and disorganized, spread across the Department of Homeland Security and at least 11 other departments and agencies, with no single person in charge. Critics point out that BioWatch can't detect pathogens released indoors, underground, on planes and buses, or in most subways. Others worry that the system is not capable of providing real-time information to first responders, potentially a fatal flaw.
But these troubling findings seem like mere side notes when compared with the main concern of some scientists: that government programs have heightened the level of danger by vastly increasing the number of researchers and labs authorized to handle deadly substances.
When the government released its case last summer against the man they believe engineered the 2001 anthrax attack, the possibility of an insider abusing the system to deadly effect became very real. While antiterrorist programs focused on international terrorism, this suspect was homegrown: He was a longtime research scientist named Bruce Ivins who worked in a government lab.
A similar incident, or one much worse, could happen again. In its efforts to protect Americans, the government has vastly increased the number of researchers with access to deadly agents. But, say critics, it has failed to implement sufficient oversight and stringent security procedures to screen them. Any terrorist looking to infiltrate a lab today has hundreds more targets to choose from than he did seven years ago. Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, puts it bluntly: "There's no question that the proliferation of bioresearch is leaving us less secure by the day."
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