Syllabus |
Resources |
Lesson Schedule |
00: Intro to the Course |
01: Intro to the Problem |
02: Public Health System |
03: Real Threat? |
04: Public Health Law |
05: Disease-Reporting |
06: Quarantine |
07: Model Act |
08: Military Presence |
09: Health Law Revisited |
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Milton Leitenberg excerpted from: Milton Leitenberg, An Assessment of the Biological Weapons Threat to the United States, "White Paper" prepared for the Conference on Emerging Threats Assessment. Biological Terrorism, at the Institute for Security Technology Studies, Dartmouth College, July 7-9, 2000.
Given the findings in the Sands-Monterey study that one single person died in the United States in the years 1900 to 1999 as a result of an act of biological or chemical terrorism, and the current discussion of biological agent terrorism as a potential mass casualty event, it is quite revealing to look at annual mortality in several public health sectors:
2. "Medical error" morality (US National Institute of Medicine, December 1999)
3. Hospital-contracted infections (US/CDC, March 27, 2000)
4. The 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee, a result of water pollution, sickened 400,000 people. 5. Air pollution in the US results in 50,000 deaths per year. 6. Firearms result in 35,000 deaths per year, and $4 billion in medical expenses. The sum of the first three categories alone results in between 69,000 and 123,000 deaths per year. These figures certainly suggest a rather enormous misallocation of priorities: the US political system can absorb roughly 100,000 deaths per year in only three related public health categories – continuously, year after year, while appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars under the sudden presumption of a potential event of extremely low probability, the true likelihood of which is totally unknown. In discussions of the requirements for response to a "mass casualty biological terrorist event," analysts have defined "mass casualty" as anything between 100 and 1,000 individuals arriving at hospitals. That means that the US absorbs the mortality equivalent of between 100 and 1,000 "BW terrorist mass casualty" events per year without any qualm or problem. One might also note that individual diseases such as Tuberculosis and Malaria result in global mortalities of 2-3 million people each, per year.
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