The former Republican Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate agrees with a national security assessment that the United States has let down its defenses against bioterrorism.
Recently USA Today obtained a report published by a bipartisan commission created by Congress. It said that the Obama administration is working hard to curb nuclear threats but failing to address the more urgent and immediate threat of biological terrorism. The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction cited failures on the biosecurity policy by the White House that have left the country vulnerable to attacks. Bill Frist, former Tennessee senator, recently authored A Heart to Serve: The Passion to Bring Health, Hope, and Healing. He says the anthrax scare in the wake of 9/11 should still be a lesson to us. "So I write about it in the book, A Heart to Serve, on how we passed that bio-terrorism legislation, the importance of it, how it shut down 50 percent of the Senate -- for six months that we were out of our Senate office buildings -- how it terrorized the nation and killed 13 people and our mailing system stopped," Frist recalls. "So it's not the sort of thing we can afford to overlook." But this latest report, he points out, says programs created after the 9/11 attacks are not being funded adequately. "Unfortunately nothing has changed. Terrorism is still out there. You can make these bugs in a laboratory for less than a $100,000, and they kill and they terrorize," the former senator warns. "Unfortunately, right now our defense has been let down markedly."
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