Medical panel urges overhaul of military vaccine program.(Brief Article)

2002 OCT 2 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Warning that "infectious agents remain a substantial threat to the operational capacity of U.S. military forces" and that "protecting the health of military personnel is essential to national security," a 14-member expert committee of the Institute of Medicine has advised the Department of Defense (DoD) to completely overhaul and unify the way it acquires vaccines and to boost vaccine spending by hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a 133-page report commissioned in April 2000 on behalf of DoD by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC), the panel concluded that the way the DoD acquires vaccines for the protection of its forces "diffuses responsibility and is inadequately funded." For that reason, the report said, the vaccine acquisition program "cannot produce the effort required to respond to a task that has been made more urgent by the continuing emergence of new natural infectious disease threats and growing recognition of the risks of bioterrorism and biological warfare."

Currently one part of the DoD purchases and maintains licensed medical products including vaccines, while another manages vaccine research and development. The research and development process itself involves a complex set of interactions among a large number of DoD agencies with different responsibilities.

"The system is broken - it has not provided the vaccines that the Department of Defense needs to protect its warfighters, and it is not funded at a level that would allow it to do that," said Stanley M. Lemon, MD, chair of the committee and dean of medicine and professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

The report soberly notes: "Up until World War II, deaths due to infectious disease outnumbered those due to direct combat injuries...and the potential remains for naturally occurring or intentionally disseminated infectious diseases to play a pivotal role in deciding the outcomes of future conflicts."

While citing the "tremendous strides" made in public health, control of infectious disease, and preventive medicine during the past century, the report warned that infectious agents remain a substantial threat to the military for three reasons: