Burr gets a look at the center his bill created
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
By Chris Fitzsimon
Barbara Barrett and Ryan Teague Beckwith, Staff Writers
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr received a personal tour Tuesday of the Health and Human Services emergency operations center that he helped create a year ago.
The center in Washington, staffed Tuesday by nearly 20 people, is charged with maintaining a constant vigil on the nation’s health — monitoring weather, news, health crises and the international path of the bird flu virus.
It is part of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act that Burr wrote. President Bush signed it into law a year ago. The bill aims to help the federal government work with local and state governments in responding to crises. Among its provisions was the hiring of a new assistant secretary, Navy Rear Adm. Craig Vanderwagen.
Tuesday morning, Vanderwagen offered a briefing on the center, housed inside the Health and Human Services agency about a block from Capitol Hill. Nine big, flat-screen televisions ringed the room on three sides. On the fourth, an entire wall displayed Web sites ranging from a weather radar map to the National Drought Monitor.
On one screen, Vanderwagen had displayed a Google Earth satellite image of Burr’s Winston-Salem office.
“I think in a year, since you spearheaded getting that act through, we have done amazing things,” Vanderwagen told Burr.
Also on the tour were Leah Devlin, North Carolina’s public health director, and Bill Atkinson, president and chief executive officer of the WakeMed medical network in Raleigh.
Burr based much of his bill on the emergency preparedness of North Carolina’s public health system. And one of the first grants awarded by the new program went to WakeMed, which is building the nation’s first hospital-based emergency operations center.
The agency will include a smaller office also created by Burr last year: the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. The office will manage private and university-based research on vaccines and drugs for national medical emergencies.
Burr said that the authority already has begun making grants for drug research but that this week’s omnibus spending bill in Congress threatens to cut that funding. more…
Last 5 posts in Daily News
- Perdue: Economy will block free tuition in '09 - January 8th, 2009
- More for Moore? - January 8th, 2009
- Donors slip past laws on ethics - January 8th, 2009
- Corruption-caliber government - January 8th, 2009
- '09 N.C. inaugural ball has more glitz - January 8th, 2009
Email This Post
Print This Post
