Citation

MacIntyre CR, Seccull A, Lane JM, Plant A. Mil. Med. 2006; 171(7): 589-594.

Affiliation

National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance of Vaccine Preventable Diseases, The Children's Hospital at Westmead and the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Association of Military Surgeons of the United States)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

16895121

Abstract

In developing public health policy and planning for a bioterrorist attack or vaccination of military personnel, the most common method for assigning priority is using the probability of attack with a particular agent as the single criterion. Using this approach, smallpox is often dismissed as an unlikely threat. We aimed to develop an evidence-based, systematic, multifactorial method for prioritizing the level of risk of each category A bioterrorism agent. Using 10 criterion, anthrax scored the highest, followed by smallpox. Tularemia was the lowest scoring agent. We suggest that such a system would be useful for developing public policy, stockpiling of vaccines and therapeutics, vaccination of military personnel, and planning for public health responses to a bioterrorist attack.

Language: en