ATLANTA (UPI) -- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded $1.2 million to Harvard Medical School and several health care companies Wednesday to develop a nationwide early warning system to detect bioterrorist attacks with deadly agents such as anthrax and smallpox.
The hope is the system “might provide the earliest possible signal of a bioterrorist event and provide an extra amount of time for public health agencies to respond,” Richard Platt, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who will oversee the project, told United Press International.
“The quicker you can respond and get to people who may be exposed ... the more lives you’re going to save,” said Steven Solomon, the CDC’s acting director of the division of healthcare quality promotion.
The warning system would use data already collected by health care companies. “Health plans will review automated data from the preceding day to look for reports of symptoms that might be indicative of the very early signs of a bioterrorist infection,” Platt said. Typically that will include reports of a cough with fever, he said.
Although a single report of a cough with a fever would not raise alarms, a cluster of people coming down with these symptoms in the same area would. The system will “look for unusual blips, unusual clusters of events, particular types of syndromes occurring in specific areas that might be early warnings,” Solomon said. He noted the system would be set up so patient data is accessed in a way “that protects the confidential and private information of patients.”
If the number of people coming down with coughs and fever is unusually high, public health officials then could collect more information about the patients and determine whether their symptoms were due to a bioterrorist attack, Platt said. If so, officials then could begin treating the patients as well as giving preventive treatment to those who may have been exposed but had not yet developed symptoms.
The system, which should be up and running within a year, initially will track 20 million people and include individuals from every state, Platt said. In addition to Harvard, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Kaiser Permanente of Colorado and HealthPartners Research Foundation of Minnesota will be participating. The health care company Optum will provide its national nurse hotline.
The goal is to expand the system eventually so more health plans participate and more people are included, Platt said, adding there already are several monitoring systems in place across the country but none is nationwide. The closest to a national monitoring system is one run by the Department of Defense to watch military personnel and Platt said he expects to work closely with them in developing the civilian counterpart.
A secondary benefit of the system is that it will provide information about outbreaks of other diseases such as the flu, he said.
“It will be helpful just to know about those outbreaks and get early warnings of them,” Solomon said. It may benefit patients at risk such as those with weakened immune systems. Public health officials could warn these people and persuade them to take precautions, he said.