But that’s not nearly enough to adequately protect the country from serious biosecurity threats, says Dr. Robert Kadlec, former member of the Homeland Security Council and director of biological defense policy under President George W. Bush.

“We understand that a nuclear event and a biological event can result in the same lethal impact,” Kadlec said.

Even so, he said, biodefense funding hasn’t kept pace.

“If we doubled the biodefense investment today, it would be about as much or a little less than what we spend on nuclear defense,” Kadlec said.

He wants the federal government to pump $10 to $15 billion annually into biodefense programs, ranging from research to developing medical countermeasures to stockpiling those drugs that would alleviate a biological disaster.

Making a biological weapon is technically easier and cheaper than constructing a nuclear weapon. Even a small release of a biological weapon can have lethal consequences. Recall the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people and infected 17 others. It took just 15 grams of anthrax to kill those five individuals, and the attack cost the economy an estimated $6 billion, according to a 2010 U.S. commission on preventing weapons of mass destruction. The FBI spent hundreds of million of dollars jetting across the world to try and figure out the identity of the anthrax mailer, while the Department of Homeland Security, along with other government agencies like Health and Human Services, spent hundreds of millions of federal dollars at home to build a biodefense infrastructre. In 2004, Congress passed Project Bioshield, which pumped several billion dollars into medical countermeasure research and emergency preparedness.

a culture of anthrax (Image from Flickr/agrillifetoday)

The 2010 bipartisan Congressional commission on preventing WMDs concluded that the U.S. should be more aggressive in the way it combats bioterror threats. Go on the offensive, so to speak. That translates into more research, more public health employees and more federal spending.

Addressing the current state of biodefense funding, Crystal Franco, policy researcher at the Center for Biosecurity said: “I think the money is being well spent. There just, overall, needs to be more.”

Asking for more money given the current state of the economy is an uphill battle. Just because the administration’s 2012 budget includes a 16 percent increase in biodefense funding doesn’t mean a financial boost is a given. First, the biodefense budget may not get full funding from Congress given the austere autumn ahead. Further, most of the money that goes to biodefense is part of a broader emergency preparedness agenda – it splits dollars with other preparedness programs.

“Over time we have adapted more of an all-hazards approach government-wide,” Franco said.

Immediately following the anthrax mailings, biodefense programs had more specific objectives. This included a hospital preparedness program of the Health and Human Services Department. The purpose of the funding was to prepare hospitals in the event of a biological disaster.

The current, broad approach to hazard preparedness largely places biodefense under a giant umbrella along with science, public health and national security initiatives. Franco notes that the broad distribution doesn’t inherently take away from biodefense preparation. Biodefense doesn’t get less funding because of the grouping.

But another governmental change could jeopardize biosecurity: a pullback in biodefense grant money. Franco said over the last few years the government has provided less grant money for biosecurity researchers. Cutting grants translates into less people working on public health research and less preparedness. That could mean fewer people with the training and skills necessary to care for the public in the event of a biological disaster. Furthermore, only a small portion of federal money for biosecurity research is put toward preparedness.

Kadlec is concerned about a declining public health work force and suggested $1 to $3 billion might be needed just to stabilize a work force that is losing employees to retirement. In 2010, the Commissioned Officers Association of the U.S. Public Health Service released a joint study that addressed a growing shortage of public health employees.

The Obama Administration has addressed biosecurity in writing and policy making. There’s a White House web page devoted to informing the public about biosecurity. However, Kadlec wants more than words from the White House: He wants action, in the form of a global biosecurity summit.

President Barack Obama has “had a number of nuclear related events” but “has not uttered one word” about implementing a biosecurity summit, Kadlec said.

Ultimately, how much emergency preparedness is needed to address bioterror or biological disasters is a difficult question to answer.

“How much is enough?” Kadlec asked. “There’s a policy element to this that hasn’t been fully baked.’’

Roger Noriega, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former top State Department official, testified before the committee that he expects to “see the Hezbollah presence in Latin America become more active and deadly in the coming years.”

Douglas Farah of the International Assessment and Strategy Center said Hezbollah is a threat to global security.

“Hezbollah’s presence in Latin America is growing, and the organization remains the premiere terrorist organization in the world,” Farah said at the July 7 hearing in front of Congress.

The U.S., Canada, Israel and the Netherlands consider Hezbollah to be a full-fledged terrorist group. A handful of other countries have reservations about that title, but consider Hezbollah a threat.

Melani Cammett, a political scientist at Brown University who attended the hearing, said although Hezbollah is militant in nature the group does not appear to be plotting against the U.S.

She noted that the Shiite militant group has not targeted the U.S. with violence since the 1980s.

But Janice Kephart from the Center for Immigration Studies and a member of the 9/11 Commission said Hezbollah is a threat to U.S national security and that allegedly hundreds of members have crossed into U.S through the Tijuana. She’s been focusing most of her research as of late on Hezbollah’s growing American presence, specifically the group’s influence in Mexico on drug cartels.

“There’s nothing that shows Hezbollah has an interest in just being a political organization. They clearly still want to retain a terrorist status,” Kephart said.

She’s convinced that Hezbollah uses Mexican drug cartels to do their dirty work – not unlike the way the Mafia would employ hit men in its glory days.

“What we’re seeing is an organization that is extremely good at using other organizations as a proxy,” Kephart said.

In addition to the billions of dollars Hezbollah makes through illegal sales –including black market baby formula in southern California and methamphetamines and cigarettes in Canada – Kephart now believes Hezbollah played a role in plotting 9/11.

“They did attack us, they just used a proxy,” Kephart said.

She said Hezbollah members trained Al Qaeda suicide bombers who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

“If the training and support had not happened, Al Qaeda could not have pulled that off.”

She’s not alone. The group Iran 911 Case is comprised of lawyers who argue for Iran’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. In a Manhattan federal court in May 2011, lawyers filed documentation on behalf of families of 9/11 victims that it claims shows Iran was influential in coordinating the September 11 attacks. It wants further U.S. investigation; other counterterrorism experts have said such involvement by Iran may only have amounted to a few people helping some of the plotters with logistics.

Imad Mugniyah, a Lebanese Shiite assassinated in Syria in 2008, is believed to have been the middleman between al-Qaida and Iran. Mugniyah was high up in Hezbollah. And Iran gave money to Hezbollah who in turn trained suicide bombers.

Foreign policy consultant and writer James Bosworth, who lives in Managua, Nicaragua, thinks the Hezbollah terrorist concern in the Americas is blown out of proportion. They are doing criminal things but they are not an imminent threat.

“There’s a real security emergency in Latin America – it is the region with the highest level of violent crime in the world,” Bosworth said in a phone interview. “And none of that has to do with Hezbollah.”

He wrote an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor arguing that by focusing on Hezbollah, the U.S. is ignoring more pressing concerns in Latin America.

The jury is hung on how much the U.S. should focus counterterrorism efforts on Hezbollah. Worth noting: the White House National Strategy for Counterterrorism, released this June, does not address terrorist networks in Latin America.

But one thing is pretty clear: Hezbollah is not going away anytime soon.

Hezbollah originated in 1982 in Lebanon during that country’s civil war. Since then, they’ve been accused of several terrorist attacks: a 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed more than 200 Marines; a TWA flight hijacking in 1985; two attacks on Jews in Argentina in the early 1990s that killed more than 100 people; a 2006 capturing of two Israeli soldiers.

Since 2006, Hezbollah has not claimed responsibility for any major international attacks, but the U.S. estimates there are several thousand Hezbollah militants worldwide and the group has tens of thousands of short and long-range rockets, according to ForeignAffairs.com.

Iran, which gives more than $100 million annually to Hezbollah, cut a significant amount of its yearly funding of the militant group.

Kephart doesn’t know how to interpret that funding cut. Does it mean that Hezbollah is becoming more self-sufficient or is there a rift between Iran and its once-trusted military partner?

“I see Hezbollah potentially splintering from Iran,” Kephart said.

In recent years, Hezbollah also has become a powerful political force.

As of June, Hezbollah controlled a majority of Lebanon’s cabinet. They are the political majority in that country and control schools, services and mosques in Lebanon.

So how much of a threat is food terrorism in the United States?

“Contamination of our food supply is a matter of great concern to the U.S government,” Barry Kellman, director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University, said in an e-mail. “That doesn’t mean there’s an imminent threat, but officials understand our vulnerability.”

Agroterrorism is not new. It’s an issue that goes back centuries, without the fancy name. Think of the final scene of Hamlet, when a poisoned cup and sword tip brings death to the main characters.

Yet 9/11 brought a heightened awareness to all kinds of terrorism. And food terrorism is a simple attack.

“It’s one of our greatest vulnerabilities in terms of ease of carrying out an attack,” Kellman said.

A potential major concern within the food industry is the poisoning of the milk supply. Richard Gray, science reporter for the London Telegraph, discussed this in a June 4 article:

“US experts have warned that the dairy industry is particularly vulnerable, as adding just a few grams of botulinum toxin or ricin to a tanker load of milk could poison or even kill thousands of consumers.”

Stanford University released a mathematical analysis in 2008 predicting the number of casualties in the event of adding toxin to a milk supply. It predicts that just one gram could affect more than 60,000 people and 10 grams could affect more than 400,000 people. The report doesn’t predict how many of those casualties would be fatal.

Some scientists are skeptical of Stanford’s findings. Although he’s a lawyer, not a scientist, Kellman works closely with researchers to access international terrorist threats.

“A lot of scientists I’ve talked to say [the Stanford report] is nonsense,” Kellman said. “I’ve got to leave it with some ambiguity.”

The U.S. government is prepared in the event of a food terrorism attack. The Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration would regulate a food supply cut-off, regardless of what food was contaminated.

There’s also an annual International Symposium on Agroterrorism, held in Kansas City several months ago. At that weekend gathering, people from the food and agricultural sector, health care industry and researchers convene to discuss food terrorism.

With natural disasters – think Mad Cow Disease – federal food agencies are trained to shut down supplies. It would work the same way with an intentional contamination. The only difference would be that law enforcement would need to get involved, which would pose an organizational challenge, Kellman said.

For the record: It was wiped out, and yet it’s still around.

And it will linger for at least three more years, thanks to a World Health Assembly decision May 24.

On that day, two-dozen countries decided to allow the U.S. and Russia to maintain a small portion of smallpox for research purposes. Only three countries – China, Thailand and Iran – opted for a quicker destruction of the world’s remaining smallpox virus. To dispel any fears, the smallpox is not just sitting around somewhere unattended; it’s located in safe, secure laboratories.

Supporters of keeping smallpox around say researching the actual virus is the most effective way for scientists to produce medical countermeasures against an unexpected smallpox release.

Which might have you wondering: If Russia and the U.S. are the only two countries in possession of smallpox, why would the world health community worry about smallpox as a bioterror threat?

That’s because smallpox – though eradicated– can be re-created in a laboratory. Having said that, researchers in Russia and the U.S. who work in labs need not worry about contracting smallpox.

“To be quite honest, it’s a perfectly safe virus to work with if you’re vaccinated,” according to Dr. David Evans, a researcher at the University of Alberta and an expert on smallpox.

Evans gets as close to smallpox as he can get in Canada. He’s been to both labs in Russia and the U.S. and says those labs are secure.

“I’m convinced for different reasons that the viruses are safe in both places,” Evans said.

There is a concern that lingering smallpox stock could wreak global havoc if put in the wrong hands.

One former World Health Organization advisory committee thinks the decision not to destroy the remaining stock of smallpox could be a recipe for disaster. Dr. Kalyan Banerjee, who also directed the National Institute of Virology in Pune, India, says in an Economic Times article that if the WHO continues to delay the destruction of smallpox, it “may truly become a poor man’s atom bomb” for developing countries or perhaps even terrorist organization.

Here’s the language from the 64th World Health Assembly press release:

Reaffirmed that the remaining stock of smallpox virus should be destroyed
The Health Assembly strongly reaffirmed the decision of previous Assemblies that the remaining stock of smallpox (variola) virus should be destroyed when crucial research based on the virus has been completed. The state of variola virus research will be reviewed at the 67th World Health Assembly in 2014 and in light of that, determining a date for destruction of the remaining virus stocks will be discussed.

Notice, the headline supports the idea that smallpox ought to be destroyed. However, no timetable is given because the research is pending.

Dr. Evans acknowledged that the advent of gene synthesis ushered in an ironic concern. While gene synthesis is meant to open doors that will one day protect populations against disease, the flipside of the breakthrough might be of serious concern. Eradicated viruses are never really wiped out.

“The technology now exists to rebuild these viruses if you really wanted to,” Evans said. “It wouldn’t be easy but it’d be pretty cheap.”

So even when the debate on whether to get rid of smallpox stock returns to the World Health Assembly’s table 2014, it will be sort of a moot point. Smallpox can be recreated even when it’s gone.

So why are we still talking about smallpox?

In an April Wall Street Journal article reporter Betsy McKay discusses the future of the smallpox disease. I did a double take when I started reading the piece. Wasn’t smallpox eradication one of the greatest feats of modern medicine?

But further research proved that in a post-9/11 world where the threat of terrorism still looms large in the minds of governments worldwide, smallpox remains on the map as a serious threat to national security. In fact, the Center for Disease Control has more than 300 million smallpox vaccinations in storage ready for the willing in the unfortunate scenario that someone release a strand.

See, smallpox – while it was formally eradicated as a naturally occurring disease in the global population in 1980 – didn’t just disappear into thin air. Several governments kept a stock of the disease in storage for research purposes.
But McKay’s WSJ story reports that the World Health Assembly voted in May on whether to demand the U.S. and Russia, two countries who continue to hold a stock of smallpox in a laboratory for research purposes, get rid of remaining stockpiles.

Since this blog’s first draft, the Health Assembly voted to allow the two countries to keep smallpox around; it’s locked away in secure laboratories, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Officials in both countries must be relieved they can keep smallpox – they were lobbying against efforts to make them get rid of the remaining stockpiles.

In 1796, when Edward Jenner successfully vaccinated the first person – his own one-year-old son, against smallpox, the world was offered a breakthrough like none other. It was granted the ability to terminate a deadly disease that puzzled populations for centuries – stretching back to rulers of Egyptian dynasties over 3,000 years ago.

In a podcast on the CDC website about the bioterror threat of smallpox, an official says it best:

“It’s incredibly ironic that the great public health triumph of eradicating smallpox in the 1970s, and the discontinuation of worldwide vaccination, have opened the door for this virus to once again be used as a weapon.”

If a bioterrorist were to unleash a smallpox strand on a given population, it would have severe consequences because people have not been vaccinated against the virus. A troubling stat from the CDC: It would only take less than 100 introductions of smallpox to threaten health on a global scale. We do live in a globalized society, as we are well aware.

David Evans, a researcher and smallpox expert at the University of Alberta, says a smallpox release wouldn’t cause the worldwide devastation that, say the Black Plague unleashed.

“You could stop smallpox fairly quickly with the techniques and technology we have today,” Evans said.

Having said that, a release would cause serious public health concern. There would be many casualties.

“I’m not minimizing the chaos and deaths it would cause if it got out,” Evans said.

The World Health Organization keeps a small stockpile of smallpox vaccination, according to its website. Read more about how the WHO prepares for a smallpox outbreak.

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“It’s very complicated because multiple government agencies are funding biodefense research with a variety of actors with labs, including corporations, non-profits, government-owned labs, universities, etc,” Project on Government Oversight spokesperson Joe Newman said in an e-mail. “Even getting a clear and accurate inventory of the number of labs with access to select agents is difficult.”

On its website, the Oversight group says the biodefense budget has increased some twenty-fold in the past decade. This raises a concern among members of that watchdog group.

“This biodefense response, if not overseen properly, may actually exacerbate the chances of accidental or intentional infection,” the group concludes.

That line of thinking – that more funding actually increases our chances of a bioterrorist strike – comes from Richard H. Ebright, a researcher at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. A Pro Publica article from December 2008 discussed Ebright’s concerns. He has publicly suggested that it would take just one post-graduate student with bad intentions working in a research lab to release a bioweapon.

Aside from safety issues in biosafety labs, a speech delivered several weeks ago by a prominent Biotechnology officer charges the government with a lack of cohesiveness among agencies with a hand in biodefense.

Speaking on behalf of the Biotechnology Industry Organization in front of the Congressional subcommittee responsible for emergency preparedness, Phyllis Arthur said:

“The lack of full integration across the Enterprise, especially as it pertains to the approval process for countermeasures, has, in several instances, led to significant delays and new regulatory actions by companies in order to achieve licensure for a product.”

It’s difficult for biotechnology companies to get a product approved, but it’s not necessarily because of government delay.

“For most drugs, the safety threshold is extremely high,” president of the International Security and Bio Policy Institute, Barry Kellman said. If there are side effects, the FDA won’t clear a drug and that’s for public safety reasons.

Two other reasons why it’s difficult to get medical countermeasures approved: There’s no market for biodefense drugs and thus little incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest in them. Also, it’s considered unethical to test the drugs on a human population (imagine the bio-ethical concerns in releasing anthrax to test a medical countermeasure).

“You have to use alternative means of showing that a drug works,” Kellman said.

The FDA will approve a drug for the market if testing it on an animal is the only ethical way of doing so. However, as Managing Director of Health Care for the Government Accountability Office Cynthia Bascetta acknowledged in a recent testimony in front of Congress:

“Animals that manifest the disease in the same way as humans may not always exist.”

Think smallpox, a virus that only occurs in humans. Monkeypox is related to it, but not similar enough to make the case that a cure for monkeypox would work in the same way as a smallpox biodefense drug.

The Government Accountability Office acknowledges challenges exist in developing and acquiring medical countermeasures. That seems to be the underlying consensus among experts, which leaves public health and safety at a crossroads.

“It would help if there was a reduction in the number of agencies funding this kind of research, better accounting of the research going on, and if one agency was designated as the ‘biodefense executive’ with authority to coordinate biodefense efforts across the government,” said Newman, of the Project on Government Oversight.

“PAHPA’s reauthorization is the opportunity to make the targeted and strategic changes to the medical and public health preparedness and response authorities and programs necessary to strengthen and improve our capabilities to successfully respond to all threats,” Sen. Richard Burr, D-N.C., said in a recent senate hearing.

Why that means anything to everyday Americans: “Medical and public health preparedness and response is a matter of national security,” Burr added.

In 2004, following a proposal of President George W. Bush, Congress passed the Project Bioshield Act, which allocated $5.6 billion of federal money for counterterrorism research. The act promised to provide 10 years of funding for medical countermeasures of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear attacks. Architects of the act insisted it would generate faster, more dedicated research, and innovative medical countermeasures. Researchers were to produce health defense drugs. What was promised hasn’t really happened yet, said one homeland security expert.

“They haven’t generated as much new stuff as they were supposed to,” said Paul Rosenzweig, deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

Rosenzweig said Bioshield faces funding shortfalls, and is in “a valley of death where there is not enough money being invested in it.” Also, little private funding goes toward medical countermeasure research.

Congress cut nearly $1.5 billion from Project Bioshield through the 2011 budget. In 2006, it created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which does medical countermeasure research. President Obama’s 2012 budget proposes a transfer of $765 million from Bioshield to BARDA and a new investment corporation for medical countermeasures. More details are in an April 2011 Congressional Research Services report on Bioshield.

There’s a bipartisan push to reauthorize both Project Bioshield and PAHPA; it’s co-led by Burr and Robert P. Casey Jr., D-Pa. Burr was the author of PAHPA back in 2006, which amended the Public Service Act and was signed into law by then-President Bush.

On May 17 the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing to discuss PAHPA and Bioshield.

Among the experts questioned on the panel: Dr. Nicole Lurie, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the Department of Health and Human Services. Lurie’s position, created in 2006 as part of PAHPA, includes the collaboration of departments within Health and Human Services and also work with Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to ensure cross-departmental preparation.

Sen. Casey, chairman of the Senate Health committee, asked Lurie to talk about her greatest fear for the nation’s emergency preparation: What keeps her up at night?

“Things I worry most about; No. 1 a threat we never thought about and anticipated before coming our way; our ability to recognize it when we see it; our ability to act quickly on it,” Lurie responded.

It takes funding from state and local partners as well as private partners to move forward on new and promising medical countermeasures, ones that “place emphasis on capabilities,” according to Lurie. With the nation in a fiscal squeeze, generating enough funds to stymie quality research is tough.

“I actually worry that we could backslide on some of our progress and that would be a dangerous situation for us to be in,” Lurie said.

Sen. Burr also expressed concern over anticipated budget cuts.

“Just today news broke that the department plans to make cuts to preparedness programs,” Burr said.

“This raises significant questions as to how the administration is preparing and coordinating their preparedness and response mission,” he added.

Phyllis Arthur knows because it’s her job. Arthur’s official title is almost too long to blog (she jokes about how long it is). Essentially, she’s the senior director for vaccines at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, meaning she works to ensure that innovative vaccine companies can get product on the market.

But the market she deals in does not function as one might expect.

Because of the risks involved in research and private companies have little reason to purchase biodefense drugs in bulk, there’s really just one customer purchasing medical countermeasures: the government.

“The government has to show its long-term commitment to this kind of research,” Arthur said.

Arthur deals with biodefense businesses and government agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services. She creates a line of communication that, she hopes, will promote research and development of vaccines. But she says it’s up to the government to “show that there’s a viable marketplace for these products.”

Given that, is the government showing a serious, enduring commitment to biodefense?

Dakota Wood, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said it’s difficult to put a price tag on biodefense.

“Spending on any capability – offensive, defensive, support – comes down to balancing and prioritizing among competing demands,” Wood said. “We’ll never achieve perfect protection against any threat.”

He added, “I think the problem will compound as science progresses in the direction of genetic engineering.”

The Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit that investigates wasteful government spending, is concerned about the overlap of government agencies involved in biodefense: the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense all include biodefense initiatives.

The director of investigations for the Project, Nick Schwellenbach, proposes a lone agency take charge of all biodefense oversight. However, he doubts that will happen.

“Agencies with a piece of the biodefense pie don’t want to give up control of their funding to another agency,” Schwellenbach said.

Budget Cutting Concerns
Several lawmakers are pushing for more funding on a Food and Drug Administration biodefense research facility in their home state. The problem is that the General Services Administration is not providing enough funds to build a fully functioning facility, argues a coalition of senators and representatives from Maryland.   The group explains its position in a press release.

The situation in Maryland is one example of what may be a broader issue. It concerns future swaths left behind after Congressional budget cuts. In an effort to trim wasteful spending, will Congress stymie biodefense research deemed too abstract or removed from actual threats?

It’s something biotech lobbyists like Arthur don’t want to happen. Cutting spending on biodefense research halts the only realistic flow of medical countermeasure advancement.

“Biodefense companies are primarily concerned about making sure the federal government is a good partner,” Arthur said.

In a time of heated debates in Washington over the nation’s budget and debt ceiling, Arthur and other biotech lobbyists continue to push for a steady stream of biodefense funding. But perhaps nothing is off limits when it comes to cutting the budget.

Cryptosporidium is a nasty parasite, if contracted. I know because I’ve had it.

I was four-years-old when Cryptosporidium contaminated the Milwaukee County water supply in April 1993. A detailed analysis by the New England Journal of Medicine estimates some 400,000 individuals in the Milwaukee area contracted Crypto during the outbreak. Of those, more than 4,000 were hospitalized and 54 people died epidemic 18 years ago. Both my parents also had to fight off the debilitating infection and survived.

Cryptosporidium is a gross infection – and in the worst of cases, a deadly parasite for those with weakened immune systems. It does a number on your stomach and takes control of your bowel movements.

(Absolutely everything you’ll ever want to know about Cryptosporidium)

And it’s also a Class B bioterrorist threat, according to the Center for Disease Control, meaning it’s on the Center’s radar as a parasite to protect society against.

There’s never been a bioterrorist release of Crypto on a water supply here in the United States. But that doesn’t mean public health officials don’t consider water supply facilities worth seriously protecting.

A section of the Illinois’ Public Health website is devoted to Emergency Preparedness and Bioterrorism.

“With any type of emergency threat it starts at a local level,” Melanie Arnold, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health said. “When funds run out, the state will help in a crisis,” she said.

One of my mother’s friends, Yvonne Demke, works in Milwaukee County as a health specialist. She’s a nurse who works for West Allis, a city that relies on the city’s water supply; the same water supply that Crypto contaminated 18 years ago.

“It was a local pharmacist that reported a large amount of anti-diarrheal being sold (emptying the shelves) to the health department that sparked questions as to what was going on,” Demke said.

To calm any fear of a future Crypto outbreak, Demke noted that by-the-book treatment of municipal water supplies is enough to prevent any biological attack. That’s what the research says.

But water treatment isn’t always the responsibility of a government body.

“When it comes to private well water, the homeowner is responsible for testing theirs,” Arnold said.

The most crucial way to prevent the spread of Cryptosporidium is to effectively monitor a water supply. Any slip up in water treatment practice could prove harmful to a given population.

To help prevent the spread of Cryptosporidium, people should wash their hands on a regular basis. The CDC offers more precaution and prevention tips on its website.