St. Louis to take part in bioterrorism study

ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis-area residents will participate in a first-time federal study to learn how best to distribute drugs to respond to a bioterrorism attack.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Home MedKit Evaluation Study will begin next month with the screening of about 20,000 people who could receive "MedKits" with antibiotics, officials said.

The CDC's plan is to place antibiotics for family members in 5,000 homes in the St. Louis area and study how people store the drugs.

Health officials also want to know if this is the best way to distribute antibiotics to fight an outbreak of dangerous bacteria such as anthrax.

Households will be selected at random from health care responders, workers at an unidentified corporation and publicly funded health care recipients.

St. Louis was picked because of other efforts in bioterrorism preparedness, including research at both Washington and Saint Louis universities, Clements said.

The project has not been publicized and was first reported by the New York-based magazine Government Security News, then by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The CDC published broad outlines for the study last month.

"The whole idea is that if we ever had an emergency situation -- say it involved smallpox -- we would be able, whatever the location, to augment what states could do," CDC spokesman Von Roebuck told the Post-Dispatch.

Roebuck said the study was a work in progress.

The antibiotics to be used in the study would include either Doxycycline or Ciprofloxacin and will be handed out in bags that have instructions.

Doxycycline could treat anthrax and other bacteria, while Ciprofloxacin has been credited with fighting infections, including smallpox.

The study also seeks to "explore attitudes, perceptions and other social and psychological factors" related to the drugs, according to federal documents.

Ways to distribute antibiotics have been discussed since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said last year that distributing antibiotics through first-responders, the U.S. Postal Service or putting them in homes was a possibility.

Leavitt said the government needed to study if such a system would work.

---

Information from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, www.stltoday.com