GERM-ATTACK PREPAREDNESS Unwanted smallpox doses likely to be tossed out

Allegheny County has scrapped its inoculation program.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Lackluster response to a nationwide drive to inoculate hospital workers against smallpox may lead to the destruction by public health officials of thousands of doses of the vaccine that have sat on shelves too long.
Health officials in Pennsylvania, for one, say they may end up throwing away three doses of the vaccine for every person they've inoculated.
"There's going to be some wasted," Richard McGarvey, a spokesman for state Department of Health, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Friday's editions.
A survey by the newspaper shows four states -- California, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania -- prepared 15,300 shots of the 53,800 doses they received from the federal government. In the four states, only 5,041 people were vaccinated.
Experts say the unused shots are not dangerous or costly but reflect doubt about the risks of the inoculations and the likelihood of a germ attack.
Comments
"I don't think [the campaign] was ever sufficiently well-justified to the medical and scientific communities that the risk of [smallpox] exposure was so great as to warrant such an aggressive approach," said Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the School of Public Health at UCLA.
"The far greater waste was the amount of attention, funding and human resources dedicated to this," Rosenstock said.
Michael Huff, acting head of Pennsylvania's Office of Public Health Preparedness, said health officials were so diligent when explaining the risks of the vaccines to people that "we talked them out of it."
The federal government shipped nearly 300,000 vaccines, which come in a powder and are combined with a solution to make 100-dose vials that have a shelf life of about three months.
Pennsylvania received about 10,000 doses and prepared about 1,200 shots. Only 256 people received the shots statewide. The leftovers will be no good by August.
Allegheny County, which led the state in vaccinations, has scrapped its program and sent its unused vaccines to Harrisburg.
California health officials prepared 6,400 doses and about one-third -- 1,847 -- were used. Ohio used just over half of its prepared vaccines -- 1,920 people out of 3,400 doses. In Illinois, about one of every six prepared doses were used, 291 people out of 1,800 doses.
What officials said
Federal officials have acknowledged they fell well short of their goal of vaccinating as many as 500,000 people nationwide to serve on special smallpox response teams, mostly from emergency rooms.
But federal health officials said enough people have been vaccinated to reduce a possible attack or outbreak and there are enough remaining doses for those who haven't been.
"There's enough out there that they can be administered quickly if there's an outbreak. Preparedness means more than just having a shot in the arm, it can also mean the vaccine is closer to the arm," said Donna Knutson, an adviser with the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.