WHEN Washington鈥檚 Ronald Reagan National Airport reopened on 4 October, the
news-stands that had been hastily abandoned three weeks earlier held a reminder
of just how much the US鈥檚 perception of what constitutes big news has changed.
The front page of The New York Times for 11 September contained a
hard-hitting article about a report from the National Academy of Sciences
calling for additional embryonic stem cell lines. The report also suggested that
if these lines were ever to be useful for human transplantation, they might have
to be derived using cloning techniques. In early September, stem cells and their
over-hyped potential for working medical miracles counted as headline news in
this country. If nothing else, the 11 September hijackings put such things in
perspective.
In a sense, it is a reflection of how far the US is from normal that we鈥檝e
had scarcely a peep about stem cells in the news for the past month. When the
news does creep back toward the front pages, it will signify a return to our
self-important, self-indulgent ways. Congress has taken a baby step in that
direction by taking up appropriations bills that provide the dollars for
government agencies鈥攊n this case, to carry out President Bush鈥檚 stem cell
plans. There is even the possibility of a fight between the House of
Representatives and the Senate over whether to allow more stem cell research
than the President has approved. The American media largely ignored that 鈥渘ews鈥�.
Maybe our return to normal is still a way off. One can only hope.
A COTERIE of scientific and medical experts has emerged into the sunlight in
recent weeks. These are chemists, microbiologists and virologists whose names
hardly ever appear on papers in the leading scientific journals. They study rare
microorganisms such as the anthrax bacterium, the smallpox and Ebola viruses,
and the plague that wiped out a good part of Europe鈥檚 population in the 17th
century. All of a sudden they are on television talk shows, giving press
conferences and showing up at newspaper offices. And their opinions make the
front pages.
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It wasn鈥檛 like this last year, or the year before, and well back into the
1990s. The same people then were labouring in obscurity because Washington power
brokers didn鈥檛 take the idea of bioterror very seriously. There was more talk of
the potential threat of 鈥淔rankenfoods鈥� than of biological attack.
It turns out that for years many of these experts have been running
bio-attack scenarios, when a bunch of experts and military people get together
in a big room and role-play. An outbreak is assumed to have happened somewhere
in the US, and everyone reacts the way they anticipate people would react if the
situation were real. The outcome of such exercises, we now find, has nearly
always been an unhappy one. The US is quite unprepared to handle an epidemic,
especially if an infectious disease were to strike in more than one place.
Suddenly the country is thinking about smallpox and anthrax vaccines鈥攖here
is very little of either鈥攓uarantines, emergency medical services and
antibiotic supplies.
Many public health experts say there is good news here. They say the US
public health system is a rusty shell. Medicine has been the focus of years of
trimming and honing and fat-cutting, to the point where there is little of what
experts call 鈥渟urge capacity鈥�. In a country where the front and centre pages
focus on cancer, obesity and diseases of the ageing and indulgent, the apparatus
for handling infectious diseases has atrophied. Now, that is very likely to
change.