[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 158 (Thursday, November 15, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H8240-H8243]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 THE THREAT OF BIOTERRORISM IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Forbes). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Ganske) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GANSKE. Mr. Speaker, September 11 did change this country. As we 
were just discussing here on the floor, all of us have very vivid 
memories of September 11. We see images seared into our minds of 
airplanes flying into buildings, those tall World Trade Center 
buildings collapsing, clouds of evaporated concrete, steel, glass, and 
our fellow human beings rolling down the streets. I have a picture in 
my mind of the flaming crater of the Pentagon and an American flag 
flying in front of it.
  A few days after September 11, I visited ground zero. At that time 
there were six or seven stories of smoking rubble. I will never forget 
that visit. I kept seeing superimposed on that horrific sight, 
essentially the graveyard of 5,000 innocent Americans, words that I had 
seen written on the wall of a family relief center just a short time 
before visiting ground zero. This was a family relief center where 
families of victims could come in, get financial help and get 
counseling as well. All along one wall for probably about 100 yards, 
families had brought in pictures of their mothers and fathers and sons 
and daughters, put them on the wall and then written personal notes to 
them, and there were flowers and candles underneath these pictures. I 
kept seeing, as I was looking at that pile of rubble, I kept seeing the 
handwriting of a little girl. One could tell she was just learning to 
write from her handwriting and it said, ``Daddy, I miss you. I will 
love you always.''

  I will tell my colleagues something. We still grieve for those 
victims. Every day in The New York Times there is one full page of 
obituaries from the victims of that attack. A little picture and a 
little story or vignette about that particular victim. I do not know 
about my colleagues, but I can only read about two or three of those, 
and that is all I can read for that day. They are very human stories. 
Because they remind us that these were people just like our neighbors, 
members of our families, and we grieve for these victims. We grieve for 
the victims of the bioterrorist attacks, the anthrax attack that has 
killed people and made many others sick.
  I remember from September 11 about 170 Members of Congress gathering 
on the steps of the Capitol in the lengthening twilight shadows to say 
a prayer for those victims. As our leadership, both parties, was 
walking off the steps, somebody started singing God Bless America. I 
felt a real sense of unity at that moment, because we were standing 
there, not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans. And the 
message that day and today and tomorrow to those terrorists is that we 
are one Nation, united we stand. You can challenge our Nation's spirit, 
but you cannot break it. And we will chase down to the ends of the 
Earth, if necessary, the terrorists who caused this attack on our 
country. Justice demands it for the victims' families, and our national 
security demands it.
  I commend the brave men and women who, even at this moment, are 
fighting in Afghanistan, flying airplane raids against the Taliban, a 
thoroughly despicable lot, the Taliban and the terrorists they harbor. 
People who have taken little girls who have dared to do something like 
go to school, taken them to a soccer field and killed them.
  The war is going well, but as President Bush has rightly said, this 
is a war that will probably go on for some period of time. It will not 
be easy to root out the nests of those vipers. They are intertwined 
throughout Europe in their nests and probably some yet in the United 
States. So we are devoting a lot of resources to find them. This 
Congress has acted on this. We have passed legislation to give 
assistance to our security forces and to our military, to give them the 
tools they need to find out these terrorists before they commit an act 
like an airplane hijacking or lacing letters with anthrax and sending 
them through our mail system.
  I think we have done a pretty good job here of, in a bipartisan 
fashion, crafting, drafting legislation, getting it signed with 
overwhelmingly bipartisan votes and to the President's desk for his 
signature that balances the rights of individuals to their privacy and 
their constitutional protections and yet, at the same time, recognizes 
that one of the most important constitutional protections is to our 
citizens' health and safety.
  Now, prior to coming to Congress I was a physician. I have taken care 
of patients with some pretty serious infections. I have treated 
patients who have had what is called necrotizing fasciitis, or in the 
popular vernacular, it is called the flesh-eating disease. But I will 
admit that when we found that there was anthrax that had gotten through 
the mail, contaminated the Hart Office Building, contaminated my office 
building, the Longworth Building, I needed to go back and review a 
little bit on the biology of anthrax and look up again some of my old 
medical textbooks on smallpox.

  Mr. Speaker, we had thought that we had eradicated that disease from 
the world, and yet we are finding out that there very well may be 
supplies of anthrax not just in secure labs in the United States and 
Russia, but potentially also in some terrorist states. Something to 
worry about.
  This last weekend I was in Iowa, I had several meetings; and I will 
tell my colleagues that people are concerned about aviation security 
and they are concerned about a bioterrorist attack. I would recommend 
to my colleagues that they see or watch the program that was on WETA 
just a few nights ago on bioterrorism, as well as constituents. We have 
even had a few phone calls from constituents back home who have been 
unhappy that we have answered their letters and sent them replies from 
Washington. One lady phoned up rather irate saying she did not want to 
get any letters from Washington that might be contaminated with 
anthrax. That may seem funny to some, but it was not funny to that 
lady. And so I believe that Congress needs to, before we leave for the 
end of the year, we need to deal with a bill to improve our national 
ability to deal with a bioterrorist attack, certainly one that could 
cause an epidemic.
  It has been clear for many, many years that the managed care 
revolution has trimmed all the fat out of our health system and I would 
argue has trimmed bone and sinew as well. There is no hospital in this 
country, in my opinion, that is capable of handling an epidemic. I do 
not care whether we are talking about Johns Hopkins up the road in 
Baltimore or we are talking about the University of Iowa hospital in 
Iowa City, or if we are talking about your local hospital. There is no 
excess capacity in our health system to handle the massive type of 
casualties that we could see from a bioterrorist attack. Believe me, 
the threat is real.
  All we need to do is read a few books. So here are my suggestions to 
my colleagues. The first book on the reading list, I think this should 
be required reading for every Congressman and every Congresswoman. That 
is a book out called ``Biological Weapons and America's Secret War--
Germs,'' by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. This 
should be required reading for every Congressman and every 
Congresswoman. It is readable; it is understandable. It does not deal 
just with biology, but it deals with the bioterrorist threat.
  There is another book that people should read, or at least parts of 
it. It is by a fellow named Ken Alibek, and it is called ``Biohazard.'' 
It is referenced in this book ``Germs.''
  Now, let me read a section. Ken Alibek was a Russian scientist who 
did germ warfare for the Soviet Union. He changed his name when he 
defected to the United States. His real name is Kanatjan Alibekov. He 
changed it to sound more American. Here is what this, a short section 
of what this book ``Germs'' says about the type of information Mr. 
Alibek brought to our intelligence agencies. What Alibek had to say was 
horrifying: ``Moscow,'' he reported in grim detail, ``had secretly 
produced hundreds of tons of anthrax.'' Let me repeat that. ``Hundreds 
of tons

[[Page H8241]]

of anthrax, smallpox, plague germs meant for use against the United 
States and its allies.''

                              {time}  1915

  The amounts dwarfed anything American experts had ever imagined. 
Alibek also described a germ empire that stretched from the Soviet 
Council of Ministers to the Soviet Academy of Sciences through the 
Ministries of Health, Defense and Agriculture and into the Biopreparat, 
his own ostensibly civilian pharmaceutical agency.
  In fact, Biopreparat was a biologic war machine that employed tens of 
thousands of people at more than 40 sites spread across Russia and 
Kazakhstan. We were worried about this.
  This book goes through the long history of biologic warfare research, 
but we were particularly worried because there filtered out of the 
Soviet Union reports of an epidemic, an anthrax epidemic in one of 
these towns that proved to be a research town.
  For years we tried to figure out whether in fact this had been 
tainted meat, like the Soviets had said, or whether in fact there had 
been a release of aerosolized anthrax by accident from one of the 
Soviet bloc labs. It turned out in the end that it was a leak, and 
there was a very significant contamination and loss of life in the 
Soviet Union from that.
  The United States carried on research, too, but nothing to the scale 
of the Soviet Union. What is worrisome is that after the collapse of 
the Soviet Union and the economic chaos that has ensued, so many of 
these biologists in the Soviet Union that were doing the type of 
research that Mr. Alibek was doing were basically unemployed. They were 
destitute.
  It is fair to say that our defense and our intelligence agencies, 
members high up in our government, have been very concerned that these 
individuals and their expertise could get to terrorist states. So, all 
of a sudden when we had these letters laced with anthrax, the public 
became very aware of this potential threat.
  Now, I should point out that this attack with anthrax was not the 
first biologic terrorist attack in the United States. I did my general 
surgery training in Oregon. Shortly after I left Oregon to go to Boston 
for some additional training, 750 people in a little town in eastern 
Oregon became deathly ill with salmonella.
  The CDC sent investigators, and they just could not crack what 
happened. Eventually they said in the end, I think it is an accidental 
exposure, food poisoning.
  It was about a year later that the true story came out. The story 
was, and this is the truth, that there was a group of Rajneeshis that 
had a compound in this county in eastern Oregon, thousands of 
Rajneeshis under the aegis of the Bhagwan.
  They had had a lot of trouble with the county government, so a county 
election was coming up. They wanted to put up their own slate of 
candidates and win that election.
  So what did they do? They set up a medical corporation. They bought a 
bunch of incubation equipment. By having that medical corporation, they 
were then able to purchase from a lab in Maryland all sorts of 
different organisms, like salmonella. But they could have easily used 
typhoid and gotten the bugs.
  Fortunately, they decided not to use something like typhoid, so what 
they did was they grew cultures and they brewed up a batch of 
salmonella. They put it into little slurries and they went to every 
restaurant and they sprinkled it over the salad bars.
  I will bet Members think I am making this up. It is well documented. 
It is documented in this book. It was documented, but a lot of people 
did not know this full story until interviews were done years later. 
Consequently, about 700-plus citizens became deathly ill right around 
the time that there were elections. Fortunately, none of those people 
became so sick that they passed away.
  I can tell the Members that I have had some personal experience with 
food-borne infection. A few years ago I was on a surgical mission down 
in Peru and ate some contaminated food and came down with a bad case of 
encephalitis, and nearly passed away. It is no fun to catch food-borne 
illnesses.
  So this problem that we are looking at runs across many different 
aspects of American life. I believe that we need to address this before 
we leave for the end of the year.
  It is clear that the United States faces a grave and I think growing 
threat from bioterrorism. There is some evidence that Osama bin Laden 
and his people have tried to develop biologic agents. We know that a 
terrorist group in Japan tried planting biologic agents in subways.
  We have also found that the recent rather limited anthrax attacks on 
our country have stretched to the breaking point Federal, State, and 
local public health abilities, so I think we need to substantially 
invest in some bioterrorism preparedness. As I said before, a major 
epidemic I think would overwhelm our hospitals. It would overwhelm our 
Federal, State, and local health agencies, as well.
  We need to be able to respond to a bioterrorist attack. We need to do 
things to improve the ability of victims to survive, improve our 
ability to treat the victims of an attack in a hospital. I think we 
need to improve our ability to contain an epidemic by expanding 
treatment. That means increasing our supplies of drugs, our 
pharmaceutical stockpiles. We need to accelerate the development of new 
treatments, including a smallpox vaccine.
  So tomorrow, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) and I will 
introduce in the House a companion bill to the bill that Senator Bill 
Frist and Senator Kennedy introduced on the Senate side today. It is 
called the Bioterrorism Preparedness Act. Let me just briefly summarize 
a few things that this bill does.
  It would upgrade Federal capacity to respond to bioterrorism by 
expanding the strategic national pharmaceutical stockpile. It would 
expand the Centers for Disease Control capacities and improve training.
  Public health laboratories, our laboratories, have been severely 
stretched in trying to deal with all of the types of cultures that we 
have been doing with just this anthrax attack. We need better disease 
surveillance so that we can coordinate information from all around the 
country, so that we have early warning systems and will be able to 
respond to those.
  We need to enhance the controls on dangerous biologic agents. Anthrax 
is an organism that exists in the soil around the United States. We 
still see a sporadic anthrax case in cattle, for instance. There have 
been many, many sites around the country that have anthrax in their 
storerooms, in their stores, in their labs, because they have been 
doing research on this as it relates to animal diseases.
  We need to make sure that those dangerous agents are properly secure 
so that they cannot be stolen. We need to improve the response at the 
State and local level.
  Mr. Speaker, the States right now are having a tough time because, as 
the economy has gone down, we will see in practically every State's 
newspapers problems with meeting their State budgets. This is the case 
in Iowa. Our legislature just had a special session where they did an 
across-the-board 4 or 5 percent cut in Federal-State spending, but it 
is clear that these State public health services have been trimmed for 
several years and are very, very insufficient.
  So we need to provide grants to the States, in my opinion, to assure 
for adequate planning and preparedness. We need to equip hospitals to 
respond to this threat. We need to develop new treatments, vaccines. We 
need to accelerate the production of the smallpox vaccine. We need to 
expand research grants for new product advancement. We need to 
authorize long-term contracts for vaccinations and drug development and 
be able to do it in a way that we do not violate things like antitrust.
  We need to improve research and development coordination through both 
public and private partnerships.
  We need to improve our food safety. We have an awful lot of food 
coming into this country from foreign countries. We need to make sure 
that there are no accidental exposures or acts of bioterrorism related 
to food coming into this country.
  If nothing else, we need to make sure that our borders are secure so 
that somebody does not try to introduce, let

[[Page H8242]]

us say, hoof and mouth disease. Hoof and mouth disease resulted in a 
several billion dollar loss in England alone. If hoof and mouth disease 
were used by terrorists in this country, it could wreak economic 
devastation on our agricultural sector and significantly hurt the whole 
economy. We need to address that.
  We need to increase inspections of food and products coming into this 
country. We need to improve the Federal Government's capacity to 
prevent and detect those terrorist activities on agriculture.
  Now, we cannot do this on the cheap; but at the same time, we need to 
be careful that we spend wisely. Senator Frist and Senator Kennedy 
introduced their bill today. This bill would cost about $3.2 billion. 
Let me run briefly through some of the areas where we need to do some 
spending and put this into perspective.
  I have already mentioned that we need to improve the national 
strategic pharmaceutical stockpile. This would increase the 
coordination of activities, increase the amount of necessary therapies, 
including therapies for post-exposure vaccines. I think it would be 
reasonable to spend about $640 million on this.
  If we then moved down to title IV in the bill, smallpox vaccine, this 
would cost roughly $500 million. So if we add up the drugs that we need 
plus the vaccines we need, we are already at about 1.2, $1.1 billion. 
That is with nothing else. If we stopped at $1.2 billion, we would have 
nothing left for doing the other things that we need to do.
  For instance, we need to upgrade the CDC's bioterrorism capabilities. 
Under the bill that the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) and I will 
introduce tomorrow, we set aside $60 million for that.

                              {time}  1930

  We need to improve the public health laboratory network through the 
CDC. That would be another $60 million. We need to improve State and 
local preparedness capabilities.
  There are about 280 million Americans, roughly speaking, in this 
country. We are proposing spending about $1 billion in order to create 
a new emergency State bioterrorism program, a grant program that would 
assist all States in achieving some minimal levels of preparedness. We 
need to strengthen the current 319(C) grant programs to allow project 
grants to address public health capabilities.
  Now, think of that, 280 million Americans, about $1 billion; we are 
talking about probably less than $3.75 per American to do this. Do you 
think most Americans think that that is too much to spend on being able 
to combat a terrorist activity at their State and local level?
  What about hospitals? As I said before, hospitals have been cut to 
the bone. In Iowa, especially some of the rural hospitals, it is even 
worse than that. They are already in the red because of low 
reimbursements rates from Medicare and from HMO's. So what do we need 
to do? We need to assist hospitals who are part of a consortium that 
would respond to an attack. I think a figure of about $375 million is a 
reasonable figure for that.
  Finally, I talked a little bit about things we need to do for 
agriculture. We have about $500 million budgeted into this bill for 
that. These are not huge sums when you are talking about a country as 
big as the United States. This comes to about $3.2 billion. As Senator 
Frist said today, we think that this amount is enough to get us ready, 
to take us from an unprepared state, to get us to a prepared state. We 
may need to do more later on. But this is a good start.
  Let me go into a few more details about the bill. Title I of this 
bill, the Bioterrorism Preparedness Act of 2001, basically deals with 
national goals to deal with this terrorist threat. The Bioterrorism 
Preparedness Act states that the United States should further develop 
and implement a coordinated strategy to prevent and, if necessary, to 
respond to biologic threats and attacks. I do not know anyone in this 
Congress that would disagree with that.
  It further states that it is the goal of Congress that this strategy 
should, number one, provide Federal assistance to State and local 
government in the event of a biologic attack; number two, improve 
public health, hospital, laboratory communications and emergency 
response preparedness; number three, rapidly develop and manufacture 
needed therapies, vaccines, medical supplies; and number four, enhance 
the safety of the Nation's food supply and protect its agriculture from 
biologic threats. Noncontroversial section.
  Title II of this bill, improving the Federal response to 
bioterrorism. This is important. It may sound a little dry, but 
unfortunately, we have a situation now where you have this 
responsibility spread out through about 40 different agencies. That is 
part of the reason why President Bush stood on this floor and said we 
need a director of homeland security. We need to consolidate. We need 
to streamline.
  Title II of this bill does this because it requires the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services to report to Congress within 1 year of 
enactment and 2 years afterwards on progress made towards meeting the 
objectives of this act. It provides authorization for the Strategic 
National Pharmaceutical Stockpile. It provides additional resources to 
the Centers for Disease Control to carry out education and training 
initiatives, to help those health professionals who are going to be on 
the front line, the first responders to a terrorist attack, to 
recognize in early stages when treatment may be effective, diseases 
such as anthrax.
  We need to improve the Nation's lab capacity. We need to establish a 
national disaster medical response system of volunteers who can respond 
at the Secretary's direction to a national public health emergency.
  This bill amends and further clarifies the procedures for declaring a 
national public health emergency. It expands the authority of the 
Secretary during the emergency periods.
  Today, before the Committee on Energy and Commerce, Secretary Tommy 
Thompson testified. He said very good things about this bill. The fact 
that the administration has worked hand-in-hand with Senator Frist, 
Senator Kennedy, Senator Pat Roberts, Senator Chuck Hagel, Senator 
Edwards and others to come to reasonable ways so that the Secretary can 
actually do his job.
  A report by the General Accounting Office raised concerns about the 
lack of coordination of Federal anti-bioterrorism efforts. Therefore, 
this bill contains a number of measures to enhance that coordination 
and cooperation among various Federal agencies. Secretary Tommy 
Thompson agreed.

  Title II establishes an assistant secretary for emergency 
preparedness at HHS. It creates an interdepartmental working group on 
bioterrorism that would include the Secretary of Health and Human 
Services, the Secretary of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Labor and 
Agriculture, FEMA, the Attorney General and appropriate other Federal 
officials because all of these officials are called upon to respond in 
this type of attack, and we need to have coordination in a working 
group.
  Additionally, Title II helps the Federal Government to better track 
and control biologic agents and toxins. The Secretary would be required 
to review and update a list of biologic agents and toxins that could 
pose a severe threat to the public and to enhance regulations regarding 
the possession, use and transfer of agents or toxins.
  Remember, I was telling the story about the Rajneeshis and how they 
were able to obtain these biologic agents. This section deals with 
that. Violations of these regulations could trigger civil penalties of 
up to 500,000 and criminal sanctions could be imposed.
  Title III, we need to improve State and local preparedness. Numerous 
reports in recent years have found that the Nation's public health 
infrastructure is lacking. For example, nearly 20 percent of local 
public health departments have no e-mail capability. Fewer than half of 
our public health agencies have Internet or broadcast facsimile 
capabilities. Think of that. Half of our public health departments do 
not have fax transmission.
  Before September 11 only one in five U.S. hospitals had a 
bioterrorism preparedness plan of any sort. Title III addresses this 
situation by including several enhanced grant programs to improve State 
and local public health preparedness.
  Today, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson

[[Page H8243]]

agreed. That is the former governor of Wisconsin. He knows what this is 
like. He knows how States are strapped for cash, how State public 
health departments have suffered, and how we need to do something to 
help.
  So there would be grants given in this bill for those States. 
Activities funded under the grant would include conducting an 
assessment of core public health capacities, achieving the core public 
health capabilities and fulfilling preparedness plans. The bill would 
also establish a new grant program for hospitals, as I have mentioned.
  Title IV, developing new countermeasures against bioterrorism. As I 
said, we need to expand our Nation's stockpile of smallpox vaccine, 
critical pharmaceuticals. Title IV gives the Secretary authority to 
enter into long-term contracts with sponsors to guarantee that the 
government will purchase a certain quantity of vaccine at a certain 
price.
  This problem with vaccines has been one that has vexed the government 
for a number of years. The pharmaceutical companies traditionally have 
not been interested in producing vaccines. It is not a big money maker 
for them. Maybe one person in a million can suffer a serious problem, 
including death from a vaccine. It probably is closer to four to six 
people can suffer some serious permanent sequela from a vaccine and one 
person might die out of a million. Consequently, there have been 
problems with lawsuits and liability related to that.
  The lab that the government has wanted to produce the anthrax has had 
real problems with control and sterility and cleanliness. It is clear 
we need to devote some funds for this.
  Title V deals with our Nation's food supply. With 57,000 
establishments under its jurisdiction, we have only 7- to 800 food 
inspectors, including 175 import inspectors for more than 300 ports of 
entry into this country. The FDA needs increased resources for 
inspections of imported food. There is no question about that. 
Secretary Tommy Thompson agreed with that today.
  The President's emergency relief budget included a request for 61 
million to enable the FDA to hire 410 new inspectors, lab specialists 
and other experts, as well as to invest in new technology and 
equipment. We think that should be done.
  Title V grants the FDA needed authority to ensure the safety of 
domestic and imported food. It allows the FDA to use qualified 
employees from other agencies. It makes sure that the FDA has authority 
to prevent port-shopping by marking food shipments denied entry at one 
U.S. port to ensure that they just do not show up at another U.S. port. 
It gives the FDA additional tools to ensure proper records are 
maintained by those who manufacture, process, pack, transport, 
distribute, receive food. It may debar a person who engages in patterns 
seeking to import contaminated food. A number of issues are involved.
  There is one issue, for instance, local to my State of Iowa. We have 
in Ames, Iowa, the National Animal Disease Center. They deal with a lot 
of very powerful infectious diseases. We need to make sure that that 
facility is secure, and we need to make sure that it is updated and 
modernized in order to fulfill its function. My colleagues may remember 
that with these anthrax cases, the anthrax is being traced to a type of 
anthrax called the ``Ames variety.''
  So these are a number of things that are in the bill that the 
gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Berry) and I will introduce tomorrow, the 
companion bill to the Senate bioterrorist bill, Bioterrorism 
Preparedness Act of 2001. I would strongly encourage my colleagues to 
sign up as cosponsors for this. We already have a fair number of 
bipartisan cosponsors for this bill. We will be dropping this tomorrow 
sometime.
  This is something that the language will be out there. People can 
look at it over Thanksgiving recess, and I would hope then that we 
could have a debate on this, both in the Senate and in the House 
sometime in the first 2 weeks of December. This is something, along 
with aviation security, that I think our constituents are demanding 
that Congress put aside partisan concerns and address as a national 
security issue.
  Once again, I want to recommend to my colleagues that they read this 
book on germs, become experts on this. We are going to get a lot of 
questions from our constituents at our town hall meetings. Sign up for 
this bill and we will be able to tell them some of the good things that 
we are going to be able to do to try to improve our ability to handle a 
potential epidemic or bioterrorist threat.

                              {time}  1945

  So with that, Mr. Speaker, I hope that we proceed with this in a 
timely fashion.

                          ____________________