Online course offers bioterrorism training

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Responding to the sudden impact of the bioterrorist threat, experts have turned to the immediacy of the Internet to reach emergency room doctors on the front lines of American health care.

The University of Tennessee and Detroit Medical Center recently began the first hour-long sessions of "Bio-Terrorism 101," an online course that allows doctors to get their questions answered in real time by national experts on anthrax, botulism, smallpox and a host of other threats.

Ordinarily, physicians would turn to national organizations or annual conferences for such training, "but it was our sense that maybe the typical physician doesn't want to wait," said Michael Stahl, director of the university's executive MBA program for physicians, which uses a similar e-learning format.

"We are doing this as a service to get emergency medicine physicians up to speed quickly," Stahl said. "Let's be honest, bioterrorism was not very big on the medical school agenda until, unfortunately, recently."

Hundreds of emergency room doctors logged on from across the United States and as far away as Great Britain, Germany, Israel, Pakistan and Kuala Lampur. The goal is to reach as many as 3,000 physicians through the program.

Eleven weeks after the first anthrax letter passed through a New Jersey post office, experts still can't say just how many thousands of Americans may have encountered the germs from contaminated mail.

Though the risk may be low, five people have died since October -- in Connecticut, New York, Washington and Florida, and at least 13 others have been infected.

Dr. Ronald Reynolds, an emergency room doctor who also runs a Web-conferencing business from his home in Myrtle Beach, S.C., suggested pulling together essentially a free, three-session course in weeks instead of months, and delivering it immediately through Tennessee's computers.

"The problem is that while this is something that comes under the domain of emergency physicians, this is just not an area in which we have had any real in-depth training," he said.

Dr. Arthur Porter, president and chief executive officer of Detroit Medical Center, agreed to help and pledged $50,000 to pay the fees of expert lecturers from across the country. Both Porter and Reynolds are executive MBA graduates of Tennessee.

"With all the events that have occurred I think there is a true need to really educate physicians in a quick and an efficient way," Porter said.

Dr. Brooks Bock, chief of emergency medicine at Detroit Medical Center, said in an interview from the American Medical Association convention in San Francisco that bioterrorism was the hot topic there. Several sessions were offered and a CD-ROM was planned.

Yet doctors didn't have to leave their homes or offices to take Bio-Terrorism 101, and they could still ask the presenters questions and get answers in real time.

Dr. Phillip Coule, director of emergency medical services at the Medical College of Georgia, said the questions were to the point during the session he conducted -- how to decontaminate the contaminated, protect the rest and filter the air.

It wasn't so long ago that colleagues turned a deaf ear when he lectured on bioterrorism, he said.

"They thought you were some kind of wacko. That this kind of thing is not possible," he said. "Now it turns out it was a very realistic scenario."