Rapid response with antibiotics would be a more effective way of handling an anthrax terror attack than a pre-emptive mass vaccination programme, scientists said on Wednesday. They estimate that if people exposed to anthrax spores received antibiotics within six days, 70 percent of infections could be prevented. Delaying treatment 10 days or more however would cut the figure to less than 50 percent. "Strengthening the public health infrastructure to improve early detection and rapid response is going to be a better use of resources to improve disease surveillance and to get drugs out to people quicker than a mass pre-attack vaccine programme," said Ron Brookmeyer, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. He and his colleagues developed a probability model to predict how an anthrax outbreak could be contained with different antibiotic and vaccination strategies before and after an attack. Their research is reported in the science journal Nature. They found that only a vaccine programme aimed at immunising the majority of people would significantly increase the prevention rate over and above what could be done with a rapid response after an attack. But getting those levels of vaccine coverage may not be feasible. --More 2145 Local Time 1845 GMT
