Book shelfBioterrorism poses new challenges for the health care systems worldwide
Published 16 November 2009
A new book points out to one of the essential challenges bioterrorism poses: Nations' primary health care system must be prepared properly to cope with cases of exceptional morbidity due to uncommon generators
“Bioterrorism is a tangible and very dangerous threat worldwide. Intensive efforts should be made to prevent or foil it and to create a suitable medical response should prevention fail,” says Dr. Meir Oren of the University of Haifa in Israel) emphasizes.
A new book — J. Shemer and Y. Shoenfeld, eds., Terror and Medicine - Medical Aspects of Biological, Chemical and Radiological Terrorism (Berlin: Pabst, Lengerich, 564 pages, ISBN 3-89967-018-3) — says that the principal challenges for the health care system are:
- To setup a body to direct the handling of such an incident at the national level and to interface with all the government authorities
- To put into operation a smoothly running and efficient system
- To prepare the public health care system appropriately and professionally on the national level and to efficiently conduct numerous epidemiologic investigations within a relatively short space of time
- To prepare the primary health care system properly to cope with cases of exceptional morbidity due to uncommon generators
- To prepare the hospital system to cope with all eventualities
- To ensure that the infrastructure of the national laboratory system achieves the required level of preparedness, and to improve the diagnostic capabilities of the national laboratories within the public health system
- To establish a structured system to train personnel; to handle, store, and accumulate information; to devise exercises; and to control, drill, and test all units of the health care system and its interfaces
- To install e reliable, well-designed information system that will serve the professional teams and also act as a source of up-to-date information and advice for the public
