U.S. still unprepared for Ebola outbreak.

• Position: Your Life - Brief article

Despite spending billions of dollars on biological defense and pandemic preparedness, the U.S. is woefully unprepared, as recent experience with Ebola demonstrates, write virologist and bioweapons specialist Steven J. Hatfill and his coauthors in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

While U.S. troops are deployed in an area of a raging epidemic, Hatfill points out that our ability to provide air transport of critically ill, highly contagious patients seriously is degraded compared with 1978. At that time, the Department of Defense created the Aeromedical Isolation and Special Medical Augmentation Response Team (AIT-SMART). The aircraft transit isolator was capable of biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) containment, and a special military unit was trained and practiced in its use.

In 2010, AIT-SMART was decommissioned, and the unified capability to admit a patient directly to a medical containment unit at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, with a suite of specialized laboratories and a team of highly experienced...