Virginia will be prepared if bird flu attacks the Washington area, according to a report released Tuesday. The District of Columbia and Maryland will be a little less ready.
Virginia scored a perfect 10 for its emergency health preparations in the fifth annual report from the Trust for America’s Health. That’s a two-point improvement from last year’s score.
The District and Maryland earned an eight, a four-point improvement for Maryland and five-point for the District. The lowest-scoring states this year received a six.
The report uses 10 criteria in its analysis of state health disaster preparations, ranging from having enough vaccines and labs for testing disease outbreaks to coordination with federal agencies.
Virginia is one of seven states to achieve a perfect score, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t work left to do, said Virginia Deputy Commissioner of Health Dr. Lisa Kaplowitz, who in 2002 was appointed to organize the state’s public health disaster preparations.
For starters, the two categories that kept Virginia from a perfect score last year — having enough hospital beds to handle a patient surge and having enough nurses — were dropped from this year’s report.
“I don’t know if we would meet the [bed] criteria for the surge this year,” Kaplowitz said. “I doubt we would have trained enough nurses in the past year to have an adequate supply.”
The criteria for the report change every year because the information about the states that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes available is always in flux, said Jeff Levi, executive director for the Trust for America’s Health.
But states overall have been improving their preparedness, despite the changing criteria, Levi said.
The report said D.C. has neither a sufficient number of labs for testing diseases nor enough staff to keep those labs running continuously in the case of an emergency.
By spring the District plans to install 12 modular bioterrorism labs, and officials are looking for cash to hire 10 more scientistsand three more support staff so those labs can run around the clock, said a D.C. Department of Health spokeswoman.
Calls to Maryland officials for comment on improving vaccine distribution and the status of laws that would shield voluntary health workers from lawsuits during an emergency were not returned.
