[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 18]
[House]
[Pages 24979-24981]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



          PUBLIC HEALTH SECURITY AND BIOTERRORISM RESPONSE ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) is 
recognized for half of the time until midnight as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mrs. WILSON. Mr. Speaker, the hour is late, at least here on the east 
coast, but we have just prepared for passage tomorrow morning a 
landmark piece of legislation to improve health security in this 
country, and I think it deserves some additional explanation as to what 
is in that bill and how it will help America to prepare for and to 
defend against any bioterrorist attack against American citizens here 
at home, and I would like to take a few minutes to explain how we came 
to this legislation and what it is intended to do and some of its 
provisions.
  We expect to vote on this bill tomorrow here in the House although we 
debated it here on the floor about half an hour ago.
  We need to be better prepared for terrorist attacks involving 
biological agents. There are about 36 different pathogens, or germs, 
that are designated by the Centers for Disease Control as extremely 
dangerous. They are in a list that is maintained by the Centers for 
Disease Control, and we have got to be better prepared against those 
kinds of biological toxins, because the fact is that the world has 
changed.
  The idea of using disease as a weapon of warfare is not a new one. It 
has existed for a long time, and countries have developed biological 
warfare capabilities even in spite of the fact that there were treaties 
against that.
  In 1979 there was an anthrax outbreak in the former Soviet Union near 
the town of Sverdlovsk, and it created some casualties near that site. 
At the time, America suspected that there was a biological warfare in 
Sverdlovsk, but we were able to confirm that after the end of the Cold 
War.
  In the Gulf War and its aftermath, we knew that Iraq was developing 
biological warfare capability, including anthrax, and we also knew that 
they had used chemical warfare agents, including against their own 
people; and we have no illusions about the willingness of Saddam 
Hussein to destroy his own people or to use biological warfare against 
the United States or any other enemy of the Iraqi Government.

                              {time}  2330

  The use of biological warfare or serious toxins by terrorists is 
something that people have contemplated, but in some ways it goes into 
the unthinkable.
  In Japan, there was use by a terrorist network of a nerve agent in 
the subways which kind of alerted us to the potential for using very 
toxic substances as a terrorist tool, but there was nothing like what 
we saw here on the east coast of the United States with the anthrax 
attack that followed on the September 11 attacks on the United States.
  The fact is that terrorism has changed. It changed in a very 
significant way. In the 1970s and 1980s, most terrorist networks were 
either fighting in wars of national liberation, trying to get attention 
for a cause, trying to shock governments for effect, but they actually 
avoided mass casualties, and did not want to have a response against 
their cause by public opinion writ large. They did not want mass death.
  But the terrorists we are dealing with now, and unfortunately, there 
are cells throughout the world, want to cause massive death and high 
numbers of casualties. The threat has changed, and America has to 
change with it.
  In the 1970s and 1980s and certainly through the 1990s, our response 
to the threat of bioterrorism was largely to deal with our military. We 
developed a vaccine for anthrax, and while it was highly controversial 
and there were some problems with it, we began inoculating American 
military personnel against some strains of anthrax. We focused on 
military protection and not on homeland defense.
  We also developed what are called National Guard civil support teams 
in about 27 States now, where there are teams of people who are 
designed to deal with unusual threats within the United States; but 
still, those were relatively small efforts, and focused on the 
capabilities of our military.
  It was really about force protection for the military: How do we keep 
the American military able to continue to fight for the United States 
in the face of a potential biological warfare attack. We really did not 
deal completely with the threat of bioterrorism here at home.
  The fact is that a new effort is required in the wake of the anthrax 
attacks and the new kind of terrorism represented by Osama bin Laden 
and his al-Qaeda network. What we saw in New York and in Washington, 
D.C. is frightening, but it is also something we have to cope with. We 
have seen a terrorist network that has the ability to organize and plan 
simultaneous attacks, rather sophisticated attacks, in the United 
States. They were able to maintain secrecy over a period of time within 
the United States. They did not come from outside, they were within us, 
within the United States. They had access to the money in order to 
carry out this very sophisticated operation, and their objective was 
not to shock or to win in the realm of world public opinion; their 
objective was mass casualties and the deaths of thousands of civilians.
  In light of that, and in light of the anthrax attacks that followed 
on the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., we know we have a new 
need that we have not faced in this country before. It is going to 
involve all levels of government, because it is the local fire 
department and the local emergency room of our hospitals that will see 
the first impact of any epidemic that is caused by a bioterrorist 
agent. We have to make sure that everybody is trained that needs to be 
trained.
  Likewise, at the State level and at the Federal level, there are also 
different kinds of responsibilities. At the National Centers for 
Disease Control, they worked with States and other networks, but there 
are all levels of government involved, and it will involve also private 
entities.
  If I am sick, I do not go to the government. If my children are sick, 
I do not go to the government, I go to our doctor. Our doctor has to be 
connected in to an early alert system, just as everyone's doctor needs 
to be. That will involve planning, it will involve training of people, 
it will involve the development of curricula and ways of communicating 
very quickly to medical professionals throughout this country what they 
should be looking for, what kinds of symptoms show up in the first 
hours, and how to distinguish those symptoms from other things that 
might not be so threatening: What is the difference between anthrax and 
the flu, and how as a doctor in rural New Mexico can I make that 
distinction so that I can care for my patients, but I do not have to 
frighten them unnecessarily?
  The second thing we knew we needed to do was to expand the 
availability of vaccines and medical equipment to deal with a large 
crisis. That is something that the Secretary of Health and Human 
Services, Tommy Thompson, brought to our attention in the Committee on 
Energy and Commerce, that in the event of a mass outbreak, not a 
naturally-occurring outbreak of a disease but the intentional spreading 
of disease in different parts of the United States simultaneously, that 
we were not prepared for that kind of a man-made epidemic, and so we 
need to expand our stockpiles of vaccines. We need to increase the 
availability of smallpox vaccine. We need to make sure that we have the 
stockpiles of medical equipment and diagnostic equipment to be able to 
deal with any epidemic very quickly and effectively across the United 
States.

[[Page 24980]]

  We knew that we needed to better control and know about what 
pathogens exist in the United States. One of the things that I think 
surprised a lot of people after the outbreak of anthrax here in 
Washington and New York and Florida was that one of the first questions 
the FBI asked was, well, what labs in the United States have anthrax?
  The first answer was, we do not know, because there is no requirement 
to say what we have. The only requirement in Federal law is that one 
has to report or register, as it says in the law, we have to report 
when we transfer a culture from one entity to another entity.
  So if I am a researcher working at the University of Iowa, and I have 
been for 20 years, on very dangerous pathogens, I do not have to tell 
anybody unless I take one of my samples and send it up to another 
university, the University of Minnesota. I would only have to tell them 
that I transferred it.
  That does not make any sense. We need to know, of all these 36 very 
toxic pathogens, these germs that can cause such havoc to our health, 
we need to know who has them; and even more than that, in addition to 
requiring that we register what we have, we need to have a sample, a 
culture of what germs everybody has and is doing research on in the 
United States.
  The reason is this: We can now map the genes not only of the human 
being but of almost any organism. If we can have an encyclopedia, if 
you will, of all of these dangerous toxins within the United States and 
know what their DNA, their genetic code is, then if there is an 
outbreak of anthrax, we can tell what the parents are or who the 
parents are, if you will.
  Then we can help law enforcement deal with any outbreak and possibly 
determine where that outbreak is likely to come from, or, perhaps even 
more importantly, be able to rule out large numbers of samples, or even 
rule out that the sample came from within the United States.
  So the bill that we are going to vote on tomorrow requires the 
registration of any of these dangerous serious germs, these 36 germs 
that are listed by the CDC, and also providing a sample of that, and 
creating a national registry, a genomic registry of what the genes of 
these germs look like.
  We know that our food systems and our water systems are vulnerable to 
contamination. We have 54,000 community water systems across the 
country, most of them serving very small villages and communities 
across the country. We have probably 100 or 200 very large water 
systems, but most of our water systems are very small. They are often 
run on a voluntary basis or a cooperative basis, where people get 
together and they have treated well water. Unfortunately, they are also 
vulnerable because of that. We need to make sure that our water supply 
and our food supply is safe, and develop ways to survey any potential 
contamination of them.
  We also knew that we needed to do more research, not only research on 
countermeasures, but research to better understand these pathogens, to 
know what their vulnerabilities are so that our vaccines and our public 
health response can be much better.
  We need better ways of mapping and surveying disease outbreaks, and 
detecting when we have hazardous germs that are present.


  All of us saw in the news in the last couple of weeks the men in the 
white suits with their Q-tip swabs going around testing things and 
wiping things and putting them on Petri dishes and trying to grow 
something, and then putting it under a microscope, and maybe 2 or 3 
days later they would know whether they had anthrax or not on that 
particular sample that they took from the back of a telephone somewhere 
in the Capitol building.
  Well, that does not make any sense in this day and age. We need to be 
able to research, develop, and deploy the technology for real-time 
continuous monitoring of the air, of the water; even do portal 
monitoring, so if one walks through a door and there is some kind of a 
germ that comes in with one that is a very serious germ, we can detect 
it, just like walking through a metal detector at the airport, entirely 
passively.
  We know we need better communications, and to plan communications in 
advance, not only between public health doctors and State health 
laboratories and the CDC, but between Federal officials and the public. 
The public needs information.

                              {time}  2340

  If there is a problem, we need to know about it so we can deal with 
it. And that means getting the straight scoop from Federal agencies 
even if they do not know everything, if they can just in a clear way 
tell us what they do know. We need to plan those things in advance 
because once there is a crisis, everybody starts working off the back 
of an envelope; and it is much easier to have those things thought out 
in advance.
  Finally, we know that we need to expand our laboratory capacity and 
expand the Centers for Disease Control. The anthrax attacks on the 
eastern coast of the United States were relatively small. They were 
frightening. They caused sickness and they caused death. But in a way 
maybe it was the canary in the mine shaft. They were relatively small 
attacks involving four letters in three different States. But it 
overwhelmed our laboratory system. We do not have the capacity in our 
laboratory system. We do not even have a level 4, which is to deal with 
the most serious pathogens; we do not even have a level 4 laboratory in 
the United States west of the Mississippi River.
  We are not prepared to be able to deal with a potential outbreak and 
epidemic and we need to. So in a bipartisan way in the House we came up 
with the Public Health Security and Bio-Terrorism Response Act. We hope 
to vote on it tomorrow, and it has some very important things in it. It 
has $1 billion authorized for planning and preparedness activities, for 
training, for lab capacity, to educate health care personnel and 
develop curriculum for health care personnel and to develop new drugs 
and new therapies and new vaccines against the most serious toxins that 
we can face in a country in a man-made epidemic.
  It authorizes $450 million for the Centers for Disease Control. We 
are going to update and modernize the CDC, and this bill will include 
funds to do that. We put into the bill $1 billion for the Secretary of 
Health and Human Services to expand the national stock piles of vaccine 
and medical equipment and other supplies, to purchase more small pox 
vaccines, to have things ready if we need it.
  I remember as a young lieutenant in the Air Force I was stationed 
overseas in England, and one of the things we had in England were 
prepositioned hospitals that were kind of stored in pallets in these 
old World War II hangars that were rehabilitated for this purpose so 
that if we ever did go to war in Europe, we would have prepositioned 
hospitals ready to go there in storage in the event of an emergency. It 
is kind of still within the project that we are talking about, making 
sure we have the supplies on hand to counteract any man-made epidemic.
  We establish a national data base of dangerous pathogens. The CDC can 
update that list anytime they want to. Right now there are 36 very 
different dangerous diseases on that list, and we require that they be 
registered and that they give us a culture of that germ so that we can 
have a national encyclopedia of the genomes of these different samples 
from around the country. There is $100 million that is authorized for 
the Food and Drug Administration to hire more inspectors at our borders 
to make sure we are monitoring our food supply.
  We certainly need to increase the research and development to be able 
to detect things remotely and give these people the tools to make this 
meaningful so that they can reassure us that the food supply is safe, 
that it has not been contaminated. And there is $100 million in the 
bill to develop vulnerability analyses and emergency response plans for 
our water systems.
  Overall this is a very good bill. It sets out national policy in 
public health safety. It will require that the

[[Page 24981]]

establishment within the health and human services department of an 
office of emergency preparedness require the development of national 
plans to deal with a new bioterrorist threat.
  There are some things that it does not do. We do not claim that this 
bill includes all the things we are going to need to do to protect the 
public health. We know that probably next year we are going to have to 
do some things with the National Guard and the military to strengthen 
that first response that every Governor turns to when something goes 
wrong in their State. We do know that this really deals mostly with 
living things, with pathogens, with organisms and not so much with 
other kinds of poisons, whether they be radionuclides or chemicals. And 
those surveillance systems are different than those you see for 
disease. And we need to think differently about how we do that.
  Finally, it does not include water research and development for real-
time monitoring. That is in a separate bill. It is sponsored by the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert), and we may see that come 
forward here possibly this week or next week to really expand our 
research and development on water safety and water monitoring.
  This is a very good solid bill. It is a very important bill, in some 
ways because it has been worked quietly and in a bipartisan way here in 
the House; we have not talked about it much. We have not explained what 
is in here, and I think it is a real concern of Americans. I know it is 
a concern of mine of, well, what if there is something that makes my 
family sick; and how do we know whether someone is trying to hurt them 
or hurt us. What if someone were to be as organized and as ruthless as 
there were in the attacks on September 11; but instead of using 
aircraft, they used disease. They use small pox or they were more 
effective with anthrax or ebola or all kinds of other things that would 
be devastating to our families and our communities.
  The Federal Government has a responsibility to step up to the 
challenge, to change the way we think about our health and our health 
security. And I think this bill goes a long way to taking us there. And 
I commend the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Tauzin) and the gentleman 
from Michigan (Mr. Dingell) for their leadership on this. And I look 
forward to an overwhelming vote on this tomorrow to pass the 
bioterrorism bill.

                          ____________________