Nation's bioterror defense system not trustworthy, GAO says
An investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that the nation's bio-defense system can't be counted on to guard against an attack, CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues reports.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "lacks reliable information" about the technical capabilities of the government's current system designed to detect a biological attack, according to a GAO report released Monday.
"DHS commissioned several tests of the technical performance characteristics of the current BioWatch Gen-2 system, but has not developed performance requirements that would enable it to interpret the test results and draw conclusions about the system's ability to detect attacks," the report said.
Deployed in more than 30 cities, BioWatch is designed to give public health officials a warning of a biological attack before potentially exposed people develop symptoms of illness, a DHS official told CBS News.
However, the GAO investigation cast doubt on DHS' claims that the system can reliably detect catastrophic attacks, saying "decision makers lack a full understanding of the Gen-2 system's capability to detect attacks of defined types and sizes and cannot make informed decisions about the value of proposed upgrades."
The GAO made several recommendations, including urging DHS to refrain from system upgrades until the issues are resolved. A DHS spokesman said the department agreed with GAO's recommendations although it "does not agree with all of GAO's characterizations of our BioWatch efforts."
The program has come under fire before for allegedly being prone to "false positives" or "false alarms." Those allegations prompted the DHS to issue a statement defending the program, saying that as of 2012, more than 7 million tests had been performed and there had never been a false positive result.