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Homeland Security Focus
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Public Health
Draft plan: FEMA may use trailers in new disaster
By EILEEN SULLIVAN
Associated Press Writer
12:21 AM CDT, June 3, 2008
WASHINGTON
The government may house disaster victims in trailers this hurricane season as a last resort, despite promises never to use them again because of high levels of formaldehyde found in trailers used after the Katrina catastrophe.
Only the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency could approve the use of such trailers, and they would have to meet the agency's standard for low formaldehyde levels, according to a draft of the agency's five-page 2008 hurricane-season plan, obtained by The Associated Press. Also, disaster victims could stay in the trailers for only six months.
Hurricane season started June 1 and will last through November. Forecasters predict the 2008 Atlantic season will be busier than average, with a good chance of six to nine hurricanes forming, including two to five major ones.
The Bush administration and FEMA came under heavy criticism for the response to Katrina in 2005. About 1 million people were displaced because of the hurricane, and thousands were sent to emergency travel trailers. It was later discovered that the trailers had high levels of formaldehyde -- a preservative commonly used in building materials. Prolonged exposure can lead to breathing problems and is also believed to cause cancer.
Complaints began popping up shortly after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, with residents of FEMA-issued trailers reporting frequent headaches, nosebleeds and other ailments.
Currently some 500 families remain in trailers, according to FEMA.
FEMA Director R. David Paulison has said there will be no more trailers while he is in office. But his deputy says that's not a sure thing should there be another catastrophic disaster.
"We're putting our head in the sand," deputy administrator Harvey Johnson said in an interview Monday. "If we had a Katrina again, there's probably no way we could respond to a Katrina without having to deploy all available options, which will include travel trailers."
For the 2008 season, FEMA is also prepared to use "Katrina Cottages," which are small houses, slightly larger than a trailer, as well as mobile homes and park models. The agency is testing other alternatives and will draw up contracts to purchase additional units once officials decide which models to use.
FEMA would also ask a disaster-stricken state to decide which disaster housing unit it wants to use. And it would ask communities to decide where they want the units. This reinstates previous roles of states and the federal government, Johnson said.
Any unit FEMA provides will be tested for formaldehyde before being deployed.
There is no industry standard for the amount of formaldehyde in travel trailers. The government sets standards for indoor air quality for materials used to build mobile homes, but not for travel trailers.
Until experts determine a safer level of the preservative, FEMA has set its own standard at 16 parts formaldehyde per billion parts of air. Late last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested 358 travel trailers, 82 park models and 79 mobile homes. The CDC found average levels of 77 parts formaldehyde per billion parts of air, significantly higher than the 10 to 17 parts per billion concentration seen in newer homes. Levels were as high as 590 parts per billion.
The draft of the 2008 hurricane disaster housing plan also emphasizes a need for FEMA to try to immediately repair damage to homes to make them habitable until more permanent repairs can be done. If a home is damaged or destroyed, FEMA will provide financial assistance, and the agency will work with community groups to find available rental properties. Some displaced victims could be eligible for temporary hotel and motel funding assistance.
But there should be more scientific studies to determine what are suitable housing units for disaster victims, said Raul Bencomo, an attorney for the hundreds of trailer occupants in Mississippi and Louisiana who are suing companies that manufactured the units for FEMA after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
"The government is in a quandary because they really don't have enough housing to be able to deploy safe housing in a major catastrophe," Bencomo said Monday.
The House Homeland Security Committee is holding a hearing Wednesday on housing plans for this hurricane season.
"It troubles me that three years after Katrina, FEMA has yet to come up with legitimate alternatives to travel trailers," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said.
"This is just another Band-Aid and another example of them kicking the can down the road and not producing the comprehensive disaster housing strategy the country needs," said Stephanie Allen, spokeswoman for Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. Landrieu chairs the Senate subcommittee that has oversight of disaster housing.
The Washington Times
Article published Apr 22, 2008
WHO at odds with Indonesia over bird flu
April 22, 2008
By Shaun Waterman - UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
A dispute over sharing samples of the bird-flu virus between Indonesia and the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) is jeopardizing efforts to prevent a global influenza pandemic and putting lives at risk, international health officials warn.
The row centers on profits made by Western pharmaceutical companies from vaccines developed using the samples, and the potential benefits of vaccines to poor nations.
Indonesian officials say their country is being cheated out of benefits from vaccines that it cannot afford.
Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari raised the issue in a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, saying Indonesia is not seeking royalties or direct payments.
Instead, she said, her nation wants "a method that leads to the allocation of values derived by commercial interests into one commonly defined system, which will provide benefits to those that have made contributions."
Last year, Indonesia stopped sending samples of the H5N1 bird-flu virus from new outbreaks to the WHO.
WHO labs analyze and gene-sequence the samples to find new variations that might herald the much-feared mutation of the virus into a form easily transmitted from human to human.
"You might say we're [statistically] overdue for another flu pandemic," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told UPI.
"The less information we have [about new forms of the virus], the less able we are to protect global public health," he said.
Health officials fear a repeat of the 1918-1919 global flu pandemic, often called Spanish flu, which killed at least 20 million people and is thought to have originated from an avian form of the virus somewhere in Asia.
Data from virus samples sent to the WHO is used by pharmaceutical companies to develop new vaccines.
In recent years, Indonesia has reported the most human deaths from bird flu, more than 100. Human-to-human transmission, however, remains rare.
"The two main planks of the process are developing working procedures for virus-sample transfer" and "a system for allocating the benefits" derived from analysis of the samples, Mr. Hartl said.
The Indonesians want the two issues linked, but the United States is insisting they be kept separate.
"Linking sample-sharing to payment in any form will immediately begin to erode our ability to make vaccines at all, because once the practice of free and open sharing of viruses stops, the slope is slippery, and there will be no end to the demands," Mr. Leavitt wrote last week in his blog (http://secretarysblog.hhs.gov).
"World health should not be the subject of barter," he wrote.
During his visit to Jakarta last week, Indonesian officials told Mr. Leavitt they wanted the issue resolved within two months.
He responded by saying that, after that time, the WHO should move ahead with new virus-sharing arrangements without Indonesian participation — effectively setting a deadline for negotiations.
"We will work on this for the next 60 days. If we haven't been successful in resolving the matter, I think it will be time for the world to just accept Indonesia's unwillingness to participate in the WHO influenza system, and move on," he wrote.
NYTimes.com
March 1, 2008
Vials of Ricin Are Found in Las Vegas Hotel; Man Is Hospitalized
By STEVE FRIESS
LAS VEGAS — A man who stayed in a Las Vegas hotel room where ricin was found on Thursday has been hospitalized in critical condition since Feb. 14 with symptoms consistent with exposure to the deadly poison, the police said Friday.
The man’s identity, age and hometown were being withheld as investigators tried to determine why ricin, as well as castor beans from which is it derived, was found in the room at an Extended Stay America hotel one mile west of the Strip.
The city’s deputy police chief for homeland security, Kathleen Suey, said the man had been staying in the room where the ricin was found for an unknown length of time and was still renting the room when the substance was discovered. A man said to be a relative or friend of the sick man had gone into the room on Thursday afternoon to retrieve the patient’s belongings when he found vials of white powder and showed them to the hotel’s manager, Chief Suey said, and the police were summoned.
Initial laboratory tests indicated that the powdery substance was ricin, a deadly poison made from the waste left over from processing beans of the common weed castor. Further tests conducted Friday confirmed those results.
Police said that firearms and an “anarchist-type textbook” also were found in the room, according to The Associated Press.
After the powder was found, authorities emptied the hotel. Seven people who had been near the ricin were taken to local hospitals but released when they showed no signs of exposure, Chief Suey said. The hotel was reopened early Friday after public health officials determined that they had removed all the ricin, which can be extremely lethal. As little as 500 micrograms, about the size of the head of a pin, can kill a human if it is ingested or injected, according to the Web site of the federal Centers for Disease Control.
The man who is ill had been hospitalized after complaining of respiratory distress but did not indicate to doctors that he may have been exposed to ricin, so county health officials and the police were never notified, Chief Suey said.
The patient is believed to be unconscious and has not yet been questioned, she said.
An F.B.I. national spokesman, Special Agent Richard Kolko, said that “based on the information gathered so far,” the events did not appear to be related to terrorism. Still, Chief Suey could not explain why the ricin was present or what its intended use might have been.
“Ricin has no medical uses other than cancer research,” said Capt. Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s domestic security unit. “An individual citizen other than being involved in cancer research or cancer prevention would not have any legal means or proper means of having that.”
Dr. Nicholas J. Vogelzang, director of the Nevada Cancer Institute, said that none of his researchers use the substance and that nobody involved with the institute had stayed at the hotel in recent months, if ever.
“We’re not doing anything here with it,” Dr. Vogelzang said. “It’s not a currently active treatment,” he said, explaining that most cancer researchers have abandoned experimenting with it because it is so dangerous.
Executives at resorts and casinos all along the Strip were watching the developments carefully. A scheduled weekly conference call between the police and heads of casino security Friday included a statement from police officials that the ricin incident was “very contained and isolated,” said a spokesman for Harrah’s Entertainment, Gary Thompson, whose company owns the Rio All-Suites Casino & Resort and Caesars Palace. Both are within a mile of the Extended Stay America hotel.
That the incident occurred off the Strip was a slight relief for resort owners.
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that, but I think it’s a shame that happened at all,” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s alarming that this material is out there and somebody is ill.”
In February 2004, ricin was found in the mailroom of the Senate majority leader at the time, Bill Frist of Tennessee. The discovery shut three Senate buildings for up to a week, but none of the dozens of people in the vicinity reported becoming ill.
In 2003, a 60-year-old former gambling executive and chemist here used ricin to commit suicide. The man, Tomoo Okada, told emergency responders that he had injected himself at his home with the poison, which prompted two hospital emergency rooms that saw him to be closed for about three hours.
This is the second major public health scare in Las Vegas this week. On Wednesday, the Southern Nevada Health District sent out as many as 40,000 letters to people who may have been exposed to hepatitis C at a local clinic after it was discovered that the clinic, the Endoscopy Center of Nevada, was reusing syringes as standard procedure since May 2004. The scale of the potential problem prompted the nation’s largest public notification involving the reuse of syringes in American history, according to the C.D.C.
U.S. has problems restricting travel, report says
Monday, September 10, 2007 3:32 AM
By Eileen Sullivan
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON -- A congressional investigation into officials' inability to stop a tuberculosis patient from leaving the country found significant security gaps, heightening concern about vulnerability to potential cases of pandemic flu or smallpox.
A report on the May incident involving an Atlanta lawyer who caused an international health scare found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacks a sound way to prevent someone infected with a biological agent from entering or leaving the United States.
The review by the House Homeland Security Committee's Democratic staff is to be released today, one day before the sixth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attack against the U.S.
Since Sept. 11, the government has focused on all types of possible threats and sought to find ways to best detect and counter biological agents.
"How we address these gaps now will serve as a direct predictor of how well we will handle future events, especially those involving emerging, re-emerging and pandemic infectious diseases," according to the report obtained by the Associated Press.
The committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., added: "If we can't counter TB, how can we counter terrorism?"
The case involving Andrew Speaker dealt with a series of notification delays and a lack of streamlined reporting systems, according to the congressional report.
Speaker was able to fly from Atlanta to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon despite warnings from public health officials.
Once Speaker was in Europe, the CDC determined he could not be transported back to the U.S. because the agency did not have the equipment to safely transport someone for a flight longer than eight hours.
The CDC asked the Transportation Security Administration to place Speaker on its "no-fly" list so he could not re-enter the country. But there was a four-hour delay between the request and the listing.
Speaker got back into the U.S. through Canada, despite instructions to Customs and Border Patrol officers not to allow him in. The 18-year veteran inspector who ignored the warning has retired.
"This was a real-world incident, and there was a breakdown at the intersection of homeland security and public health," Thompson said. "The government has numerous plans and policies in place to secure our communities, but they just didn't follow the playbook."
CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said the agency continues to learn lessons from the incident and is completing its own review.
"Preparedness is a process and not an event, and people need to realize that we are light-years ahead of where we were six years ago," Skinner said. Each instance, such as the one in May, is a way to test and exercise the government's systems, he said.
A House Homeland Security subcommittee plans a hearing this month to address these concerns.
NYTimes.com
August 30, 2007
World Briefing | Africa
Congo: Hemorrhagic Fever Suspected; 103 Die
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
More than 100 people have died in a remote part of southeastern Congo, including all those who attended the funerals of two village chiefs, in what health officials fear is an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. People began dying after the funerals in Mweka, in which relatives washed the bodies of the deceased, said Jean-Constantin Kanow, the chief medical inspector for the province. Four villages are affected, and 217 people became ill, including the 103 who died. In the past, Congo has seen large outbreaks of Marburg and Ebola, hemorrhagic fevers caused by viruses that can attack the central nervous system and cause bleeding from the eyes, ears and other parts of the body. The last major Ebola outbreak struck the city of Kikwit in 1995, killing 245 people.
The Washington Times
Article published Aug 22, 2007
Fears of bird flu pandemic subside
August 22, 2007
By Amy Fagan - Researchers have discovered numerous changes a flu virus likely would have to make in order to spread as a human pandemic, but so far it seems the avian-flu virus has made just a few of those changes.
"It's reassuring," said David Finkelstein, who led a team of researchers from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Virology.
The scientists identified 32 "markers," or clear differences between influenza viruses found in birds and in those that infect humans.
Scientists hope that by learning these markers they will be able to monitor whether the bird flu, referred to as H5N1, is becoming more of a "human" virus and thus a global threat, Mr. Finkelstein said.
"While we can't directly estimate how long it would take an avian virus such as H5N1 to acquire these traits, we can use these markers to roughly measure the distance between an avian influenza and a pandemic," said Clayton Naeve, St. Jude Hartwell Center's director and senior author of the paper.
The good news is that so far, bird-flu viruses in humans have only occasionally shown any of these markers. Current bird-flu viruses "are no more adapted to humans today than they were in the past," the researchers say.
The team compared the genetic makeup of thousands of avian viruses to thousands of viruses from human patients and found 32 amino acids that differentiated the two groups. This indicates that these 32 are "markers on a road" toward a pandemic, said Mr. Finkelstein, a research associate at St. Jude Hartwell Center.
Thirteen of the markers were present in the flu viruses that caused deadly pandemics in 1918, 1957 and 1968, the researchers found.
"The 13 are sort of the minimum dangerous set, as far as we can tell," Mr. Finkelstein said.
But so far, no single human infection of bird flu that was examined showed more than two of the markers, which means bird flu is probably "more than a couple of small steps away" from becoming a human pandemic, he said.
Mr. Finkelstein cautioned, however, that the team's research was a statistical analysis and must be verified in a lab. And he stressed that researchers don't know definitively how many steps or how fast it would take for a virus to become a pandemic.
There have been 321 cases of human infection with bird flu and 194 deaths since 2003, mostly in Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
But it hasn't spread rapidly, like the 1918 flu outbreak that killed millions. Scientists want to know why this hasn't happened yet and what signs to look for, Mr. Finkelstein said.
According to a factsheet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the unknowns about bird flu give health authorities cause for concern.
"Most cases of avian influenza infection in humans are thought to have resulted from direct contact with infected poultry or contaminated surfaces. However, there is still a lot to learn about how different subtypes and strains of avian influenza virus might affect humans," it states.
Mr. Finkelstein said he hopes their research is one more "nugget of information" in that effort.
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