Bioterrorism is one of the country’s biggest post-9-11 concerns.
How quickly doctors can detect an agent of bio-war will determine how many people will be affected.

We’ve had a taste of how even very small releases of bio-terror agents can wreak havoc: the anthrax attacks after 9-11; the sarin nerve gas attacks in Japanese subways.

The threat of bio-war is very real today. Doctors making the first diagnosis need to be armed to be able to make a quick diagnosis.

Bio-weapons are diseases we simply don’t see. So, the key to protecting the public as the final line of defense is early diagnosis.

That’s where an E.R.-based computer program called visual dx comes in.

“Visual DX is really an incredibly powerful program that helps us in a number of ways but it was directed to us particularly to help us diagnose bioterrorism or potential bioterrorism cases,” says Dr. Lewis Kohl, Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Long Island College Hospital. “You can go in and put in a patient symptoms, you can describe what the rash looks like, what part of the body it is, how old the patient is.”

Then, the list and images of possible illnesses comes up.

Name the rare disease that could be a bio-weapon, it has it--like monkey pox, for example.

If a doctor is thinking anthrax, he or she can easily find the signs and symptoms defined, with the accompanying matching images.

The program has over 10,000 images to help doctors make a rare diagnosis.

Now while doctors in emergency rooms, especially those here in New York City, are trained in bioterrorism, and they run drills all the time, when you don’t see ricin, or Marburg virus or smallpox every day, if ever, it can be hard making the diagnosis.

“The scary part of smallpox is they come in they look like the flu they don’t have a rash for the first two days, they have fever headache back pain and a week later they look like this,” Dr. Kohl instructs. “You can’t be wrong if you think someone has small pox, because as soon as you start using that word you’re going to get police involved and FBI and departments of health and isolation and your hospital is going to be closed off. So you want to be pretty sure before you pull that alarm.”

But this diagnostic tool is costly—around ten thousand dollars a pop. Dr. Kohl says that makes it difficult for hospitals to acquire it on their own.

But he says, if the price was more affordable, all hospitals should have it, and, he believes most would buy it because it is so valuable.

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