Experts said the U.S. government’s Bioshield program will not be adequate to create medicine to protect against a biological attack. That’s the conclusion in a new study that includes interviews with 30 prominent members of industry, government and universities about biological threats, the New York Times said Friday. The government has spent $14 billion to improve defenses against biological attack since Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax letters that killed several people that year, the study says. The report was prepared by the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Sarnoff Corporation of Princeton, N.J. The consensus was a major epidemic of a new disease for which no drugs or vaccines exist is “a virtual certainty.” The biomedical experts said Bioshield, created last summer, was “not sufficient to engage industry or to produce the countermeasures that will ultimately be needed,” the report said. © Copyright 2004 by United Press International

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