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Bush here today to highlight spending on terrorism
Tuesday, February 05, 2002 By James O'Toole, Christopher Snowbeck and Bill Heltzel, Post-Gazette Staff Writers
President Bush will meet medical and university officials in Oakland today in an appearance highlighting the homeland security initiatives in the budget proposal he sent to Congress yesterday.
The president will be accompanied by his homeland security director, former Gov. Tom Ridge, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. Bush will tour a clinical microbiology laboratory at UPMC Health System before speaking on anti-terrorism issues before an invited audience on the University of Pittsburgh campus.
The visit will be an exercise in mutual lobbying. Bush will use the high-profile event to promote an important part of his budget while the local university establishment does its own lobbying for a share of the spending increases called for to combat bio-terrorism and other threats. Bush will be greeted by officials from UPMC, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.
The administration's budget calls for a doubling of appropriations for homeland defense in the coming fiscal year. That includes a call for $5.9 billion to combat bio-terrorism.
Bush was a regular visitor to Pennsylvania during the election campaign and since his inauguration has made relatively frequent stops in a state that he lost narrowly in 2000. Last March, the new president visited a Beaver County business "ginning up support," as he put it then, for the major tax cut he had just sent to Capitol Hill with his first budget package.
That visit showcased a new administration with domestic economic issues paramount on its list of priorities. Today's itinerary reflects a presidency transformed by its response to terrorism. In his State of the Union address last week, Bush emphasized three priorities: winning the war against terrorism, homeland security and reviving the economy.
His schedule this week mirrors those themes. He talked about his call for increased defense spending at a Florida air base yesterday. Homeland security takes center stage today. He is expected to discuss the economy along with anti-terrorism issues during an appearance tomorrow at the World Economic Forum in New York City.
"The president is traveling to Pittsburgh to talk about one of the most important portions of his budget," said Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman. "Pitt has been doing some good work on public health and the surveillance of disease. ... It's an opportunity to talk to doctors and health care professionals and see some of the work they're doing."
One of the highlighted projects is a hospital computer system that could provide early detection and warning of bio-terror attacks. Called the Real-time Outbreak Disease Surveillance system, the 2-year-old program collects clinical information from 17 regional hospitals and looks for signs of infectious disease outbreaks.
The system receives data about patient symptoms, ages, genders, addresses and test results directly from computers in emergency rooms and hospitals. It monitors 800 patient visits per day, looking for patterns that might point to a bio-terror attack.
The surveillance system is just one of the research projects undertaken by the BioMedical Security Institute, a joint venture of Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health and Carnegie Mellon
Last week, the government announced how it would divvy up among states more than $1 billion this year to bolster the nation's public health system, with a focus on bio-terrorism preparedness. Some of that money will finance a new lab in Allegheny County -- possibly to be run in conjunction with Pitt -- that can analyze evidence of suspected bio-terrorism, state officials announced last week.
The president's visit will affect traffic, but, as usual, his precise route and timetable are being kept "hush-hush until the last minute," a city police traffic officer said. A county official said there will be rolling roadblocks along the motorcade route.
"They're not going to keep the parkway closed for two hours," said the official, "so I don't think it will affect traffic much."
Each section of the route will be closed for about a half-hour ahead of the motorcade.
Bush is expected to arrive at midday at the Air Force Reserve base near Pittsburgh International Airport, go to Oakland for the tour at UPMC, make remarks at the nearby Masonic Temple and depart aboard Air Force One later in the afternoon.
If the schedule holds, police could begin shutting roads from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., starting with the Parkway West and ending in Oakland. On the return trip, roads could be closed from around 2 to 3 p.m., beginning in Oakland.
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