Smallpox vaccination grin...( A PLAN to vaccinate nearly half a milli...)

But the failure may run deeper. In a damning report released last week, the US Institute of Medicine, an independent advisory body, says the problem is not that so few have been vaccinated, but that so much time and money has been spent on the vaccination programme. It argues that this should have been spent on more important defensive measures such as disease surveillance and response plans.

"There are many things more important than vaccinating people," says Brian Strom of the University of Pennsylvania, lead author of the report. "We have no idea if we're prepared for a bioterrorist attack." He cites the failure by doctors in Wisconsin to report cases of a disease similar to smallpox until 13 days after they saw the first rash (New Scientist, 21 June, p 12). Luckily, it turned out to be monkeypox.

The vaccination programme was announced by President Bush last December. The first phase was to be mandatory smallpox vaccinations for half a million military personnel, and voluntary vaccinations for another half a million "first responders"- the healthcare workers needed to carry out emergency vaccination and treat victims during an outbreak. That number was derived by multiplying the 2000-odd emergency rooms in the US by the staff needed to run them, says D. A. Henderson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the successful worldwide smallpox eradication campaign in the 1970s and helped devise the US plan. "State health officers counted 420,000 people they would want to vaccinate to provide some reasonable standard of emergency care."

But doctors and nurses stayed away in droves. The vaccine is a live virus that can spread from person to person and might have harmed patients, especially those with im
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Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-207-331-2751
New Scientist
20-Aug-2003