Almost 18 months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, along with the anthrax-tainted letters that followed, the United States remains unprepared to respond to victims of an attack involving chemical agents, experts told United Press International Tuesday.
The warning comes a day after a former top Iraqi nuclear scientist, Hussain al Shahristani, said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has stockpiles of both chemical and biological weapons and could be continuing to manufacture more.
"We're just way short of where we could be and ought to be" in terms of being prepared to respond to a chemical attack, said Dr. Griffin Trotter, an emergency room physician and bioethicist at St. Louis University in St. Louis.
Emergency responders around the country do not have adequate personal protection equipment and communications equipment, he said. In most scenarios involving a chemical weapon, the responders will need to be fully protected from hazardous substances. This will require specially designed suits that cost about $25,000 each, he said.
Emergency teams also lack training for responding to a chemical attack, which is "absolutely critical," Trotter said.
The training of paramedics and emergency responders has improved since Sept. 11, 2001, but "we still need some work," said John Roquemore, who helps train emergency responders to deal with attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. He also is president of the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians.
"We still have a long ways to go specifically targeting (emergency medical services)," said Roquemore, who has 20 years of experience as an EMT and is in charge of EMT program compliance for Jefferson Parish, La. "There still needs to be a lot more education ... practice and doing field exercises."
Part of the delay in improving preparedness may come from a lack of funding at both the federal and local government levels, Trotter said.
"Preparations can be very expensive," and it is taking time for governments to allot the money and distribute it to specific programs, he said.
Hospitals have estimated it would require $11 billion to implement the changes necessary to handle victims of terrorist attacks. The current budget only calls for $3.5 billion for this, which "falls far short" of what the hospitals need and does not begin to address resources needed for fire departments and other emergency personnel, Trotter said.
"Federal funding won't even cover half of it but at least some federal funding would be desirable," he said. "I'm just frustrated that it's so slow in being implemented."
In the meantime, it would be "helpful for people to know what these agents are," Trotter said. The chemical agents most likely to be used in terrorist attacks will be nerve gases, such as sarin, VX, soman or tabun -- all able to rapidly kill people and cause illness and fear in thousands.
In 1995, when sarin gas was released by terrorists on subways in Tokyo, 12 people died and more than 3,200 went to the hospital, he said.
Disrobing can help minimize the possibility of breathing in the residue of noxious agents left on clothing, Trotter said.
"The first thing you need to do is get the heck out of (the area) and then get undressed," he said.
That is the type of thing emergency personnel would learn in training.
"In Tokyo, a lot of the people in the hospital had not been trained" so they did not know that removing clothing would have removed the majority of the chemical residue, Roquemore said. As a result, some of the doctors and nurses treating the exposed victims developed symptoms of sarin poisoning themselves.
