Senators near agreement on bioterrorism bill

After several false starts, Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and HELP Public Health Subcommittee ranking member Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Thursday they expect to introduce their joint bioterrorism authorization bill early next week.

At a news conference featuring representatives of medical and public health groups detailing new training efforts to help front-line medical workers better prepare to deal with bioterrorist attacks, the senators said they were close to agreement on a measure they originally hoped to unveil last week.

Kennedy and Frist are working on two separate tracks.

One is a request for $1.5 billion made to appropriators to fund an authorization passed last year, including more money to help state and local public health agencies prepare for bioterrorism, and to purchase more drugs for the national pharmaceutical stockpile.

Separately, they are working on a follow-up authorization that would cost roughly $3 billion to cover issues not addressed in last year's bill, including ways to protect the food supply, and incentives to encourage the development of new drugs and vaccines to treat or protect against bioterrorism agents.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said Thursday there would be no efforts to append a bioterrorism package to the fiscal 2002 Labor-HHS spending bill currently being debated on the Senate floor.

"I think the best way to do it is just take it up under the homeland defense bill when we bring it up next week," he said.

Meanwhile, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee today heard testimony on ways to create a better "early warning" system in the event of a bioterrorist attack.

"The anthrax outbreak is our firebell in the night. We may not get another warning," said Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Jim Greenwood, R-Pa.

While current disease surveillance efforts center on phone calls and faxes, Claire Broome of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the CDC is moving toward development and implementation of an electronic system that could provide "real-time reporting of information for public health action," including linking not just public health officials, but also hospitals and laboratories.

At least two private entities--Quintiles Transnational Corp., and a consortium of healthcare firms called the eHealth Initiative--said they could easily adapt current claims processing systems to help detect bioterrorist events.