HHS To Review Public Health Threat Readiness

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department announced plans yesterday to reassess the nation’s attempts to produce vaccines and treatments for biological weapons and other public health threats, the Washington Post reported today

On a day when the government announced it had made available less than half the hoped-for number of H1N1 vaccine doses, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said her department would undertake a thorough review of policies affecting all of the country’s public health emergencies.

The plan goes beyond longstanding problems associated with the swine flu vaccine program to include what she called “countermeasures” against disasters, both natural and manmade.

“Today, we face a wider range of public health threats than ever before in our history,” she told the American Medical Association’s Congress on Health System Readiness. “It could be anthrax delivered in an envelope. It could be a dirty bomb set off in a subway car. It could be a new strain of flu that our bodies have no immunity to.”

Speaking to the AMA group in Washington, Mrs. Sebelius admitted the “challenges” involved in the government’s billion-dollar campaign to protect the population against the current pandemic, but she concentrated on obstacles beyond development of better vaccines.

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