FMMS PRIMER ON BIOTERRORISM

Dear Fresno-Madera Physician,

The Fresno-Madera Medical Society is pleased to help you understand the physician=s role in a biological or chemical terrorist attack. You are a care giver for our community. To provide effective care, reassurance and counseling, you must have information.

Though not a legal or scientific document, this APrimer@ provides a brief summary and overview of what we all need to know in the event of such an assault. We are indebted to the San Diego County Medical Society and its infectious disease specialists who are members of its GERM (Group to Eradicate Resistant Microorganisms) Commission for the content assembled from a host of different sources and provided herein. At times like these, it is most helpful to be able to quickly package available information from whatever sources to disseminate as rapidly as possible and we thank SDCMS for its willingness to share this material.

This document will be available in printed format for members (or non-members) requesting it, but clearly the ease and rapidity of sharing it via this electronic means is our most efficient form of doing so. To that end, we remind all of our members to share with us their preferred email address so that we may continue to disseminate urgent, vital or critical messages to you as rapidly as possible. (We assure you that your e-mail address will not be shared with anyone else.)

We hope that any of our non-member physicians seeing this material will better understand just one of the many things FMMS provides and/or attempts to do for its members. We invite your participation in membership and urge you to contact FMMS at 224-4224 ext.12, to obtain a membership application.

Thank you for viewing and reading both this message and the included information. We sincerely hope we will never have to face a time when this information is truly needed, but we want to be prepared and be able to assure our patients that we are ready!

Virgil Airola, MD

President, Fresno-Madera Medical Society