WASHINGTON, 11 September 2005 — Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the failure of the US emergency services to handle the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina is due to resources being diverted to the “war on terror,” experts say.
With thousands of National Guard soldiers deployed in Iraq and medical resources being diverted to deal with a potential biological attack, the southern United States was less prepared than it might have been when Katrina struck on August 29.
“The most recent effects of these diversions of funding have been seen in the unfolding tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the surrounding area,” said Erica Frank from Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “Had there been more bodies on the ground, there would have been fewer deaths. But 7,000 National Guards from Louisiana and Mississippi are deployed in Iraq,” she said. In June 2004, southern Louisiana’s emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the local Time Picayune newspaper that federal funds appeared to have been diverted instead of paying for repairs the state’s dykes, designed to protect the low-lying region from flooding. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us,” he wrote at the time.
“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay.”
Had the thousands of the National Guard deployed in Iraq instead been at home, Frank said, they would have been on hand to help prevent the disaster, to have rescued those trapped, contained the human losses and helped survivors.
Although the final death toll has yet to emerge, estimates of the human cost of the disaster have varied wildly, with some suggesting the toll will be in the thousands.
Public health officials expressed concerns particularly over financing for programs designed to counter a bioterrorist attack, which they said were disproportionate and diverted funds from more important research programs.
The cost of vaccinating against smallpox and programs to counter an anthrax or botulism attack has been estimated by the Centers for Disease Control as costing some six billion dollars over the next six years. Since smallpox has been eradicated from the United States since the 1970s, the government considered that the risk of it being used by extremist militant groups justified the use of a vaccine for the emergency services and medics. The same theory applied for the use of the anthrax vaccine among the military.
In late 2001, several letters containing anthrax were sent to US locations, creating a general panic. An investigation into the letters has still not yielded any arrests. But even so, in 2002, New York became the only city to receive $34 million by the Department of Health to prepare itself for the event of a bioterrorist attack, compared to $1.3 million allocated to cardiac illness, the primary cause of death in the state, medics contend.
“Massive campaigns focusing on ‘bioterrorism preparedness’ have had adverse health consequences,” said Hillel Cohen from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City said in October last year. The campaigns, he said, “have resulted in the diversion of essential public health personnel, facilities, and other resources, from urgent, real public health needs.”
“Bioterrorism preparedness programs have been a disaster for public health,” he added.
The federal response to Katrina, the first major disaster to hit the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks, has been roundly criticized as being too little too late.
