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Disease Reporting May Be Changed

Posted on: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 00:00 CDT

By Michelle Saxton

West Virginia health officials have proposed changes to speed up the reporting of certain communicable diseases or potential bioterrorist events - and therefore quicken the response time.

Rules for reportable diseases, events and conditions are updated every few years, Dr. Loretta Haddy, the state's epidemiologist, said this week. The last time was in 2001, before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and increased recognition or concern of several diseases.

"There's just new diseases that we didn't know about before, like SARS and monkey pox," Haddy said. "Then the things that have been unimaginable, that anyone would deliberately release anthrax into the population to make people sick and make people die. Those kinds of things were unimaginable before 9/11 to a great degree."

Proposed changes include reclassifying reporting categories to emphasize the need for faster reporting of cases such as anthrax, plague and smallpox - and to expand such reporting to include bioterrorist attacks, monkeypox and SARS.

The state currently has three categories for diseases or conditions, with the highest - Category I - requiring that health- care providers and laboratories notify local health departments within 24 hours of diagnosis.

The changes would increase the categories to five, with Category I requiring immediate notification and the use of an electronic report.

"Twenty-four hours isn't fast enough anymore," said Dr. Danae Bixler, the state Bureau for Public Health's director of infectious disease epidemiology.

Proposed rule changes also specify how officials would respond to disease outbreaks or bioterrorism.

While health officials are already trained to respond to such events, the rule changes would detail how the investigations should be conducted and make health officials accountable to follow through, Bixler said.

"This just spells it out in the rule," she said.

Electronic reporting will also help speed things up, Bixler said. The state has a pilot project it is operating along with the traditional paper-based system of reporting.

Changes in the West Virginia Reportable Disease Legislative Rule are expected to go before state lawmakers during the 2006 regular session.

Source: Charleston Gazette, The

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