A surprisingly little-noted news story over the last few weeks was the detection of a microbe that causes Tularemia, more commonly known as "rabbit fever," in various locations around Washington, DC during the last anti-war protests.
Like the recent scare about potential terrorist attacks in New York City subways, it highlights the ongoing tension between the public’s need to know about potential threats and the government’s responsibility not to pass on willy-nilly every last piece of information and thus desensitize us for when the big ones come (more commonly known a “crying wolf.”)
The Bangor Daily News' Joanna Broder has a good run-down on the “rabbit fever” story. Briefly, bio-sensors around DC detected what could be the bacteria that cause rabbit fever during the protests. “The bacteria occur naturally in the soil but also are considered a potential weapon of bioterrorism along with anthrax and smallpox,” the News explains.
The working theory appears to be that the bacteria were in the soil anyway and the marching stirred them up. (Which makes it rather amazing this is a first-time event, given the number of activities and amount of traffic there is in the area anyway.)
Tests raised concerns, but not to the level of a full alert. So more tests were done and finally the samples were sent to the CDC, which confirmed that it was the bacteria in question. Public healthy officials were alerted to this fact the Friday after the Saturday marches.
Getting the local angle, the Bangor paper reports:
Maine state health officer Dr. Dora Mills said that when she received the alert on Sept. 30, "I was just sort of scratching my head." The alert provided little information about the level of risk involved. "I had to read it twice to wonder what they were trying to get us to do," she said.
Other government officials were more blunt.
There should have been a much more rapid notification of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] by the Department of Homeland Security, [and] in turn the CDC should have quickly notified the local health authorities," said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
"Just imagine if there had been a biological release and the sensors had picked it up and we had lost five days in potentially identifying and providing early treatment to victims. That would be a terrible situation," she said.
And:
U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the Committee on Governmental Reform, wrote letters to the Department of Homeland Security and the CDC in early October to find out why public health officials in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia were not notified sooner.
"If the bacteria detected can cause a flu-like illness and if symptoms can begin to appear one day after exposure it appears that notification of the appropriate state and local officials was delayed too long," Davis wrote.
Dr. Jeffrey Stiefel, who runs BioWatch, the $60 million program that detected the bacteria, gave the other side of the argument:
"You've got to think of the greater good on this one," he said. "If you come out and say that this is what it is and you're wrong and the entire public health response network stands up, then you now ... have that community losing faith and potentially nationwide losing faith in the system."
Since no one has gotten sick, it appears that this was much ado about nothing. But: After every major terrorist attack, past warnings about the specific vulnerability that terrorists exploited come bobbing up. Let’s hope that the critics are wrong and that this incident doesn’t one day join those ranks.