If a bio-terrorist attack were to strike Western Pennsylvania, at least one hospital staff… If a bio-terrorist attack were to strike Western Pennsylvania, at least one hospital staff thinks it would still be able to effectively handle the needs of its patients.

On Friday morning, Oct. 10, U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, R-Pa., attended a groundbreaking ceremony outside of UPMC St. Margaret Hospital for the new $1.6 million expansion of the hospital’s emergency room to handle bio-terrorism situations.

“UPMC and St. Margaret’s are leaders on the fight against bio-terrorism,” Specter said. “The new construction is a tremendous step forward to provide emergency treatment and a response to bio-terrorism, and I’m pleased to announce the $1,600,000 which was secured for the Appropriations Committee to help in this project.”

Specter, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, which oversees federal health spending, also talked about the new Strategic Medical Intelligence Unit.

The SMIU is a coalition of volunteer, local medical professionals that seeks to more quickly diagnose patients and medical symptoms for signs of a biological attack. Specter announced that he will be seeking federal funding for it.

“This is a groundbreaking ceremony and UPMC’s work on the Strategic Medical Intelligence initiative is a groundbreaking effort in and of itself,” he said. “UPMC is working with the FBI, with their 50 plus centers, to coordinate on planning to respond to an attack with weapons of mass destruction.”

Specter was introduced by St. Margaret Hospital’s President and CEO David T. Martin, who thanked the Senator and UPMC Health System for helping finance an expansion he called “long overdue.”

He said the construction would take about a year and allow St. Margaret’s, which he estimated has 33,000 annual visits, to expand to 24 treatment rooms and eight bays and serve communities all along the Allegheny River.

Calling the construction “two projects in one,” Martin talked about the hospital’s increased emergency capacity as well as the newfound capability to deal with the decontamination of an estimated 1,400 bio-terror victims in a 24-hour period.

“The second project [bio-terror response] is not one that I’m extremely excited about,” he said, “but we need to be prepared for bio-terrorism, nuclear, chemical [attacks], and in such an event, if that did occur, we would be prepared.”

Specter said Pennsylvanian hospitals and fire and police departments are in the beginning stages of heightening their ability to respond to a bio-terrorism situation, adding that he spent the month of August touring the state’s “first responders.”

He said that more has to be done by local agencies to aid those larger national ones that have been created since Sept. 11, 2001 for counter-terrorism.

“We have created the Department of Homeland Security,” said Specter. “We’ve appropriated 29 billion dollars, but they have a great many responsibilities; border patrol, and immigration, and Coast Guard, but we really need to pay more attention to bio-terrorism.”

Specter said it is impossible to predict the likelihood of a bio-terror attack, but he added that better protective measures must be sought.

“We went through the color-coding system, as you know, the country was put on alert, and it was really counter-productive, because you can’t keep people on alert all the time,” he said. “It’s like crying wolf, and when the wolf finally comes nobody’s paying any attention because you’re numbed by all of the prior predictions.”

Dr. Michael Allswede, chief of the Special Emergency Response Section for the UPMC Department of Emergency Medicine and an expert on bio-terrorism, expanded on some of the specific biological dangers to which Specter alluded.

“A lethally communicable disease like small-pox or SARS or plague would create the greatest challenges to management,” Allswede said. “Because not only is it lethal if you have it, it also creates fear in those who do not, which creates the need to not associate with one another.”

Allswede also said without taking measures now, this fear of personal contact during a bio-terror situation would be “devastating” to certain institutions.

“[Emergency departments] which depend on face-to-face communication, the stock market, interstate travel, and all forms of assembly would essentially stop or be severely curtailed with that sort of an environment, which truly is a strategic threat to the nation, stopping our face-to-face communication through the threat of infectious disease,” he said.

According to Allswede, SMIU would help in making first responders more prepared.

“What our Strategic Medical Intelligence organization is directed to do is to create a better topography on the local level so that local law enforcement, local doctors and medical assets can be more wisely directed toward the threats that come and go in our local areas.”

Specter’s visit came on the same day Vice President Dick Cheney said, in a speech to The Heritage Foundation, that certain terrorists are trying to gather weapons of mass destruction to kill many thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror.”

This also comes on the heels of CIA chief Iraqi weapons inspector David Kay’s interim report on his first three months of work, presented to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on Oct. 2.

Kay, who leads the 1,200-person Iraq Survey Group, said, while the group had found no chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, they had discovered evidence of a biological program. He said Iraqi scientists have come forward with equipment, technology, diagrams and documents and 97 vials of reference strains and biological organisms, including one strain Kay claimed could be used to produce bio-weapons, were found by his team concealed in the home of an Iraqi scientist.