Arizona is not sufficiently prepared to react to a biological terrorist attack, said tech industry executives, county and state health officials and professors from the W. P. Carey School of Business on Friday.
"We're here to showcase bioterrorism and the importance of it to people and how critical it is to be prepared," said Govind Iyer, an associate professor of information systems, at the Technology Solutions for Bioterrorism Issues meeting in the Memorial Union.
"We've already seen anthrax," he said, referring to letters containing the bacteria that were mailed to The National Enquirer office, NBC anchor Dan Rather and the U.S. Senate in October 2001.
"We don't know if it could be anthrax, smallpox or something sprinkled in the water system or a salad bar," he said.
The W. P. Carey School's Center for the Advancement of Business through Information Technology sponsored the meeting. Cisco Systems co-sponsored the event.
The Department of Homeland Security has contracted technology companies like Cisco Systems and Intel to help respond to biological attacks.
The companies will also work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local health officials to create universal programs to report outbreaks of illnesses.
"In 15 counties we don't need 15 different reporting systems," said David Engelthaler, the chief of the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response. He also serves as the Bioterrorism and Emergency Response coordinator for the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Lori Bush, a senior adviser in Cisco's Homeland Security organization, said business technologies could assist in detecting attacks.
The National Retail Data Monitor, she said, could be used to monitor for unusually high sales of over-the-counter medications. Those sales could indicate that citizens are unaware they have been deliberately infected with weaponized germs.
"It could watch for certain sales to see if people are self-medicating, rather than going to doctors," she said. "We have these new tools and there is an imminent problem."
Public indifference to the threat of biological warfare remains a debated issue.
To some, it seems that since the Sept. 11 attacks the American public has become complacent to the threat of terrorism.
"It's been only two or three years since the towers fell, and people are already thinking about the sale at Macy's," said Julie Frasco, a Maricopa County health official. "We need to raise the level of consciousness."
Brad Kirkman-Liff, a health management professor in the business school, said that maintaining consumer confidence is important.
The role, he said, should be secretive, similar to that of the secret agency in the 1997 movie "Men in Black," in which agents covertly fight hostile extraterrestrials while the unsuspecting public lives normal lives.
The Center for the Advancement of Business through Information Technology will release a report on May 7 that will gauge the level of preparedness for biological terrorist attacks in Arizona.
Reach the reporter at christian.palmer@asu.edu.
