(MintPress)– Residents in Minnesota awoke Sunday morning to find empty pill bottles in their mailbox, courtesy of The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) and U.S. Postal Service (USPS), who were responding to a simulated airborne “bioterrorist attack”.
It was the first wide-scale test of the nation’s first-ever comprehensive plan for using postal personnel to deliver emergency meds. It was designed to combat situations such as an epidemic or large-scale anthrax attack. The effort was also previously test-piloted in Boston, Philadelphia and Seattle, but Minnesota was the first such effort to conduct the program on a broad scale.
Three-hundred mail carriers delivered the faux medications to almost forty thousand homes in parts of St. Paul, north Minneapolis and several surrounding suburbs.
The mail carriers, accompanied by police escorts, dropped off the simulated supplies of the antibiotic doxycycline in the form of an empty pill bottle along with a note reading “this is only a test” into mailboxes Sunday.
MDH spokesman Buddy Ferguson said that the police escorts would be used in order to protect postal workers in the event of “a real event” where medications would be procured from the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), the United States’ national repository of antibiotics, vaccines, chemical antidotes, antitoxins and other critical medical equipment and supplies.
The SNS warehouses medications in geographically strategic and classified facilities under 24-hour armed guard protection across the U.S. They are situated to allow rapid delivery. The U.S. Marshal provides armed security from these federal sites to local destinations.
Ferguson stressed that there was no reason to think anyone would want to steal such medications, as the SNS supply is very large.
First wide-scale test
A press release from the MDH on the event painted a picture of a doomsday scene in describing the situation that the operation hoped to prevent.
“The scenario might be a widespread, life-threatening infectious disease outbreak, or it might be a deliberate bioterror attack, targeting the entire metro area, using a deadly agent like anthrax. It could be any large scale health emergency that requires getting medicine to a very large number of people, very quickly,” the press release read.
Dr. Ed Ehlinger, Minnesota Commissioner of Health, said, “If an anthrax attack ever took place, we would need to get everyone who might have been exposed on preventive antibiotics – within 48 hours, if possible. Our primary tool for doing that would be special medication distribution centers, operated by local public health agencies and located throughout the metro area.”
Ehlinger added that getting people on medication would be challenging but especially important “with a highly fatal disease like respiratory anthrax.” Utilizing the USPS to do part of the job would ideally alleviate some of the pressure on potential medication distribution centers, he said.
Officials also said that in the event of an actual biological attack, the people distributing medication would be among the first to get it.
The areas selected were chosen to include a wide variety of housing configurations and delivery requirements for postal workers as they distribute the meds, Jane Braun, Director of Emergency Preparedness at MDH, said.
“It’s only a test,” Braun said, adding that residents of the targeted areas should not be concerned about the activities taking place in their neighborhoods, or worry that they face any higher risk of being targeted in in actual bioterrorist attack.
Executive order and postal woes
While Ferguson said that entities in Minnesota had been planning for the event since 2004, efforts ramped up after President Obama issued an executive order in 2009 in order to establish a model for postal workers to deliver medication if a large-scale biomedical emergency were to occur. The president said in the order that “the U.S. Postal Service has the capacity for rapid residential delivery of medical countermeasures for self administration across all communities in the United States.”
The debt-ridden Postal Service has been under scrutiny recently, and thousands of post offices across the country are facing closure.
Last week the Senate passed a bill to overhaul the Postal Service, which will go to a vote in the House. A report in the New York Times said that lawmakers don’t appear to be in a hurry to proceed despite a May 15 deadline set by the Postal Service before it will start closing an estimated 3,700 post offices. The Postal Service is billions of dollars in debt and loses an average of $36 million a day this year.
A group of senators co-sponsoring the Senate legislation wrote a letter to House members calling for a vote, and stating, “The Postal Service’s financial crisis will likely come to a head in the next few months. Without legislation, the Postal Service will not be able to make payments that are due and will likely be forced to slash services. We fear that the resulting degradation of mail service will further drive away postal customers, only hastening the loss of postal revenue, the accelerating contraction of mail processing and mail-related industry, and further loss of associated jobs.”
The co-sponsoring Senators included Senator Joseph I. Lieberman independent of Connecticut; Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, both Republicans; and Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware.
“We are proceeding with our plans on the assumption that the postal service will be there and will be able to do this work,” Ferguson said.
A $200,000 federal grant paid for the simulation in Minnesota, which will serve as a model for other cities. Louisville, KY., Philadelphia, Boston and San Diego are also planning similar simulations.
Event called a success
Officials in Minnesota said “Operation Medicine Delivery” was a success, but admitted that a complete assessment of the event may take weeks.
Edward Gabriel, an official of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was quoted by Minnesota Public Radio as saying, “The Twin Cities are the only metropolitan area in this country to reach this step in preparation. Minneapolis, St. Paul, the state of Minnesota, on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House, I thank you for your leadership in this effort.”