Dispensing Medical Countermeasures for Public Health Emergencies. Workshop Summary. Held in Washington, DC on March 3-4, 2008

摘要

Threat of an anthrax attack as the case study, on March 34, 2008, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events hosted a workshop titled Medical Countermeasures Dispensing. The workshop was organized by an independent planning committee. The following is a summary of the presentations and discussion that transpired during the workshop. Any opinions, conclusions, or recommendations discussed in this workshop summary are solely those of the individual persons or participants at the workshop and are not necessarily adopted, endorsed, or verified by the Forum or the National Academies. The overall workshop objective was to review a range of solutions to provide medical countermeasures rapidly to large numbers of people to protect them before or during a public health emergency, such as a bioterrorist attack or infectious disease outbreak. In particular, the workshop goals were to: identify and discuss the most promising methods for dispensing medical countermeasures as well as their inherent strengths and challenges; identify nearterm opportunities for promoting efficient and effective dispensing mechanisms at the state and local level; and to bring invested stakeholders (including local, state, federal, nonprofit, and corporate representatives) together to discuss these methods, opportunities, and challenges. Dispensing refers to the delivery of medical countermeasures to the population. Distribution, on the other hand, refers to transporting Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) assets (including vendor managed inventory) from its original location to the state receiving, staging, and storing (RSS) warehouses, as well as the receipt, staging, storage, and transportation of materiel from the RSS warehouses to dispensing sites.