Medical Project Aims To Spot BioterrorismMedical Project Aims To Spot Bioterrorism

The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention last week awarded a $1.2 million grant to an association of health-care organizations and researchers called the Harvard Consortium to develop a pilot for an early-warning bioterrorism surveillance network.

"The beauty of this system is that it piggybacks on clinical data that's already collected by virtually everyone" in health care, regardless of the level of sophistication of their clinical systems, says James Nordin, a pediatrician and researcher at HealthPartners Research Foundation, a member of the Harvard Consortium. "That's important because surveillance systems are only successful if their use is sustained."

The system will gather data each evening from doctors' offices and health-care facilities and transmit the information to a database at Harvard. The data consists of industry codes that represent patients' symptoms such as coughs, fevers, and rashes. It will be compared with historical data to determine, for instance, if physicians in Boston have seen patients exhibiting odd symptoms for the time of year, the geography, and the population, which could indicate early signs of smallpox or anthrax. If unusual patterns are detected, the system will automatically alert local public health officials and the CDC, if necessary.

Existing surveillance systems use data collected in emergency rooms. Collecting data from doctors' offices "can give public health officials a two-or three-day lead in detecting something usual," and hopefully preventing further outbreaks, Nordin says.

Dr. Richard Platt, lead investigator for the Harvard Consortium and a professor at Harvard Medical School, says his group is writing a set of software programs that should help most health-care providers easily collect the needed data for bioterrorism surveillance.