ShareThisA shortage of veterinarians is putting America's national security at risk.
That's the warning issued this past week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which has found that a current shortfall of government vets -- and the imminent retirement of hundreds from the already stretched ranks -- means the country is unduly vulnerable to a public-health emergency or a biological terror attack that spreads a foreign animal disease.
GAO investigators also said government agencies have little sense of how many veterinarians they would need to respond to a large-scale outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease or an attack on the food supply.
As an example of the problem, the report noted that the Animal and Plant Health and Inspection Service in 2003 had to borrow more than 1,000 vets from federal and state agencies around the country, as well as the private sector, to control a bad outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease in California poultry. That meant the nation was short an adequate number of vets to respond to simultaneous outbreaks of bovine tuberculosis in Michigan, monkey pox in Wisconsin and West Nile virus in Colorado.
The federal government employs an estimated 3,058 veterinarians, primarily in the Agriculture Department, with 1,043 in the Food Safety and Inspection Service alone.
An IRS survey of tax-exempt hospitals found that CEOs earned an average of $490,000 in 2006, and that the hospitals returned about 7 percent of the revenue to their communities in free care.
Some in Congress, who have been skeptical of how charitable charity hospitals really are, no doubt will compare the salaries with those in corporations getting government bailouts, which are to be capped at $400,000.
The economic upheaval under way may contribute to more peril on the highway. The Insurance Research Council says it expects the tough times to trigger a sharp rise in the number of motorists without insurance.
The just-released report found a strong correlation between the percent of uninsured drivers and the unemployment rate, calculating that each 1-percentage point rise in the jobless tally is associated with a nearly equal increase in the uninsured rate.
The council estimated that, given unemployment projections, more than 16 percent of drivers are likely to be uninsured in 2009, compared with just less than 14 percent in 2007.
Though it drew little notice, the House voted Feb. 11 to create a national "Silver Alert" communications network, patterned after the Amber Alert system that spreads the word fast when a child goes missing. Silver Alerts would be issued when any elderly person with Alzheimer's or a similar condition wanders off. Such a system in Florida is credited with locating 37 missing seniors since October. The House authorized $5 million for state Silver Alert programs. The measure now goes to the Senate.
President Obama has pledged to make the U.S. government more transparent and open, and no doubt there's always room for improvement. But a new report from the International Budget Partnership, a Washington-based group that argues for fiscal openness, finds that Uncle Sam is more accountable than most, although behind Great Britain, France, New Zealand and South Africa in an 85-nation ranking.
The group found that 80 percent of the world's governments don't share enough information for the public to hold officials accountable for what's done with their money.
(SHNS correspondent Lee Bowman contributed to this column. E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Washington Calling
