[Dan Day]

"Twenty years from now, [if terrorists] have a disease that can kill everybody, I’m going to be able to take that disease the first time it hits, diagnose it, take it apart, and figure out the cure and the vaccine within 24 hours," she said.

This is nothing but pure pie-in-the-sky speculation, and it seems insanely optimistic. It's like the many predictions in the 50's through the 80's that declared confidently that we'd have complete cures for cancer by the year 2000.

Such drastic and unprecedented improvements to both public health agencies and health care providers could only result if President Bush implements a national defense policy that places biological defense as a top priority, injecting large amounts of cash that would still only be a fraction of budgets given to the Defense Department and homeland security efforts, O’Toole said.

Bingo, here's her real agenda. This is nothing more than the world's largest grant application. "Give us truckloads of money, and we'll see what we can do", O'Toole says. And she cleverly links it to the most current medical bogey-man, bioterrorism, to increase the chance of public support.

[eno_]

She may be a rent-seeking Communist, but she is right about proportionality: If you spent serious money, you could make diagnosis, isolation, the deployment of antibiotics and antiviral drugs, and rapid vaccine development work to make bioterror essentially impossible.

It is basically a good thing to get the medical community thinking outside the box on this stuff.