Interesting article, n_s.

When reading it, I was waiting for a sentence to explain to me how this is going to have any effect on terrorism. After I finished the article, I'm still left wondering.

If there are signs of, for example, an anthrax problem- why can't hospital personnel just use the telephone and place a 35 cent call to a hotline at the CDC and tell them about it? Someone there could make a note of it, and that's that.

If they absolutely need to do this "high-tech," they could just set up a password-protected website for hospital staff to login to, enter in the stats each week of whatever string of diseases that are signs of a bioterror attack, and then the CDC will analyze this. It could all be done with free/GPL software and be setup/maintained by the IT staff at the CDC.

Isn't that much cheaper than this system? It sounds to me like whoever proposed this and won the contract knew someone in government with the ability to approve it, and capitalized on that. I just don't see how this is neccessary when there are much cheaper, simpler alternatives.

Why hundreds of millions need to be spent on this across the country is beyond me.

-yawkaw