Last modified: Thursday, February 21, 2008 10:19 AM PST CDC: Idaho’s emergency response better but could improve BY REBECCA BOONE Associated Press BOISE — Federal money and old-fashioned practice have made Idaho better prepared to deal with a public health emergency, but the state could still improve, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. The state has conducted several emergency drills to test how the state Department of Health and Welfare and local health districts would respond to a pandemic flu outbreak, for instance, or the need to dispense special medicines to hundreds of thousands of people. Those drills earned high marks in the CDC report. But Idaho has yet to conduct a CDC-approved drill on what to do in a bioterrorism event, or on how to communicate if both the power grid and land lines go down. And the computer message system at the state’s public health laboratory doesn’t meet technology standards recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public laboratory is charged with testing and confirming agents, such as E. coli bacteria, that threaten the public health. ‘’We’ve come a long way but there’s still a long way left to go,’’ state Health and Welfare spokesman Tom Shanahan said.The report is part of a national look at how states have improved their readiness for public health emergencies and the challenges those states still face. It was the government’s first assessment of the payoff from its investment of more than $5 billion since the terrorist attacks of 2001 to make the country better prepared for a variety of public health emergencies. Idaho’s share of the cash was more than $44.5 million between the fiscal years 2002-2007. The state’s health workers did take part in a bioterrorism exercise, though it was a multistate effort based in Oregon and may not have met the CDC criteria for the report, Shanahan said. And the state laboratory is expected to get a new computer system this year, he said. In the meantime, the CDC has supplied Idaho with a temporary fix: computer software allowing Idaho’s computer system to transmit information to a CDC database. The new computer system, once installed, will make the information sharing much easier, Shanahan said. An emergency drill to test the state’s public health response when both power and land lines are down will happen sometime before this August, Shanahan said, but the exact date has not been released, to maintain the elements of surprise and urgency among drill participants. The CDC report noted that Idaho’s lab hasn’t conducted training for the state’s front-line emergency responders recently, but that training gap has been filled by The Institute of Emergency Management at Idaho State University, Shanahan said. Some of the most dramatic improvements since 2001 have come at the state’s district health departments, said Darcus Allen, the planning and exercise manager at Central District Health, the department that serves the Boise region. ‘’I don’t want to live in a state that says it’s 100 percent ready,’’ Allen said. ‘’In the course of the last five years we’ve built partnerships with fire departments, police officers, hospitals and now those are very familiar faces to us. Our partnerships are our greatest strength.’’ Last year the district got to test just how well its employees could handle a large-scale vaccination effort, with district health workers and volunteers giving flu vaccine shots to about 1,200 employees at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center, she said. ‘’We found it didn’t stress our system and that we’re capable of doing the things we need to do. Now we need to maintain and refine our plans, not getting lax,’’ Allen said. The state’s regional health districts also used the federal money to hire public information officers who can help get the word out to the public in case of an emergency. Few of Idaho’s districts had someone tapped to do the communication work before 2001, Shanahan said. ——— On the Net: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov