County bioterrorism director named

By Sharon Salyer

Herald Writer

The second major step in creating a bioterrorism response team in Snohomish County was taken Thursday with the naming of Nancy Furness as its director.

The new group was created by the Snohomish Health District board after last year’s anthrax outbreaks. It will have a first-year budget of about $238,000.

Among other duties, the team will regularly survey 800 doctors and emergency room workers at the four hospitals in Snohomish County in search of suspicious illnesses, and help coordinate the public health response when problems are found.

Furness will lead three other team members who have yet to be selected: a registered nurse, an epidemiologist and an office assistant.

Dr. M. Ward Hinds, who heads the countywide public health agency, said Furness has nearly 23 years of experience as a registered nurse. She has worked for the health district since 1990, mostly in the agency’s communicable disease division, helping counter outbreaks of food-borne illnesses and diseases such as E. coli and meningitis.

Furness, 45, will be paid $64,812 a year. The Edmonds resident said she hopes to have the other three members of the group hired in the next several months.

The team will work with Seattle-King County and state health officials to get the program started, Furness said.

One of her first actions will be to attend a conference on how to organize mass distribution of medications that might be needed in a bioterrorism attack.

Local health district officials met Wednesday with researchers at the University of Washington to work on a new, sophisticated surveillance system that will alert health care workers to diseases associated with bioterrorism earlier in an outbreak than would be possible now, Hinds said.

Hopes are that the new system will use information routinely collected at hospital emergency rooms, walk-in clinics and possibly by hazardous materials teams, he said.

The health district board approved the new team in November, in part at the urging of Jack Blackwell, a Lake Stevens City Council member. The military veteran and longtime Army reservist said he thought it would be "highly negligent" not to create the team.

You can call Herald Writer Sharon Salyer at 425-339-3486

or send e-mail to salyer@heraldnet.com.

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