Spring 2002
Confronting the terror within
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Terrorism
has come home, and to meet the new threat of biological assault
UCLA has marshaled its best and brightest minds
By Dan Gordon '85
Illustration by Tavis Coburn
 Terrorism
in the homeland — the attacks in New York and Washington
and the flurry of anthrax-tainted letters that killed five people,
infected 18 and forced 30,000 Americans onto a regimen of prophylactic
antibiotics — occurred thousands of miles from Los Angeles.
But as the nation's attention was fixed on the East Coast and the
sobering threat of biological assault, UCLA was actively engaged
on the Western Front.
In
those anxious days and weeks, UCLA's Office of Environment, Health
and Safety responded to about 100 incidents of suspected anthrax
on campus. The calls, says Rick Greenwood M.P.H. '75, Ph.D. '78,
director of the office, ranged from sightings of white powder to
suspicious letters. None of them amounted to anything — nor
did the large number of cases of UCLA patients who feared that their
rashes were cutaneous anthrax. But it was enough to make one think:
If a concentrated outbreak thousands of miles away can keep the
campus and hospital that busy, what would it be like if a more potent
biological or chemical attack were focused on the West Coast —
or West Los Angeles?
As
a Level-1 trauma facility, UCLA Medical Center is open to any and
all medical emergencies, and it is anticipated the hospital would
receive a large number of cases in any regional disaster. As a leader
in the delivery of primary care — at the campus hospital and
through satellite hospitals and outpatient clinics — UCLA physicians
and nurses could be on the front lines of a bioterrorist act. That
understanding of this past fall's events prompted UCLA to create
a 30-member Bioterrorism Preparedness Task Force to ensure that
the campus and its medical community are as prepared as can be for
what had been, to most people, an unthinkable event. And with its
share of faculty among those who have thought about such things,
the campus is playing a prominent role in prepping the state's physicians
and public-health professionals, as well as informing legislators
and educating the public.
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