What needs to be done to prepare our public health infrastructure to deal with biological warfare?
JOSEPH: The infrastructure at the municipal and county levels is underfunded. It s weak. It is not well coordinated with the clinical sector or the law enforcement sector. It often doesn t do a good job with the media. In all sorts of ways we need to beef up everything, from computerized information systems that link horizontally as well as vertically, to increased laboratory resources, to tighter relationships between the clinical and public health sides. We are very fortunate because of that doc in Florida who made the diagnosis in the first case. I had always postulated that the first-line person was going to be someone on call at a community hospital at midnight on a Sunday and would not recognize what he or she saw. BORAK: I have been trying to push the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine to develop models so that corporations can use their existing facilities as adjuncts to the public health system. Most large corporations already deal with trying to get m
