Is the UK Prepared for Bio Terror?

Predictions say it’s not a matter of if the UK will face a bio-terror attack, but rather, when this sort of attack will happen. How prepared are the Brits for this unhappy eventuality?

In an article in the London Daily Times, Steve Boggan spoke with scientists at Britain’s Health Protection Agency’s Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response at Porton Down, whose research aims to help the country survive in the event terrorists unleash a biological weapon on the country. Boggan says terrorism and defense experts “say it is a matter of when, not if, [the UK has] to face the challenge of a biological, chemical or radiological attack.”

Boggan says the scientists have been coordinating planning for attacks involving anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox and other bacteria since April 2003. “We have a 24-hour capability, with four teams of four working a seven-day rota, one week on, one week off,” Allen Roberts, Group Leader, Novel and Dangerous Pathogens, told Boggan. “In the case of an emergency we have people permanently in contact with pagers. If we are sent samples from a potential outbreak, it is no good growing cultures or having tests that take 48 hours because people need to be treated immediately.”

Over the past few years, Boggan says, the government has been working to pull together skills that already existed among emergency response and medical personnel “so that a response to any chemical, biological and radiological attack should run like clockwork,” he says.

“We have had simulated exercises involving up to 200 people from the emergency services, hospitals and local authorities where there has been an imaginary release of sarin, a smallpox outbreak, a dirty bomb, a release of chlorine gas, and so on, all over the country,” Dr Nigel Lightfoot, the director of Emergency Response Capability, told Boggan. “In each case, we get the emergency and health services together and throw a problem at them to see how they would respond. From each exercise we’ve learnt new lessons and implemented them. We are improving all the time, but if you were to ask are we ready, I would say yes.”