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Most movies that feature the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis (e.g., the Kevin Costner flick Thirteen Days) are at once excessively serious and excruciatingly dull. Not so the 1993 Joe Dante production Matinee, a comedy about young love amidst improbable circumstances. In the movie's most memorable line, a concerned mother in the southern Florida town explains to her son that if there is a nuclear detonation, he should look away from the blast; then stop, drop, and cover; and then come right home.

Fair or not, that was the line that kept coming to mind as I read When Every Moment Counts: What You Need to Know About Bioterrorism from the Senate's Only Doctor, by Senator Bill Frist, M.D. (R-Tenn.). Any honest reader will admit that Frist means well, but we're often left wondering if he doesn't completely miss the point.

The book begins with a retelling of the story of the anthrax letters, delivered to Congress via the offices of senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Leahy (D-Vmt.) in October of last year, that shut the House down for several days, made a few congressional buildings unusable until months later and almost caused mass pandemonium. During this time, Frist, as the "Senate's only doctor" (there are several in the house), was constantly asked for advice and information from concerned colleagues and staffers. This massive concern from those in and outside government led to the Centers for Disease Control's Website being overtaxed and then crashing. Other information resources were similarly strained.

In response, Frist turned his own Website into a hub of information, ordering his staffers to maintain and update the site around the clock. He responded to many queries for information with a terse (but one, assumes, friendly), "Go to the Website," and mentioned it when he was on television. As a result, a lot of people—as many as 40,000 per day—started to access the Website. Frist realized then that people were "hungry for knowledge," a gap which When Every Moment Counts attempts to fill.

As far as plugging the information gap goes, the book does a tolerably good job. Frist performs the family doctor routine: answering well over a hundred questions with sufficient detail to inform the ordinary reader but not so much as to be daunting. And his advice is often sensible. For instance, he does not recommend that everybody go out and buy expensive gas masks, for although a gas mask can "reduce inhalation exposure by 98 percent" such a protective device is "effective only if you are wearing it at the time of [a biological weapon] attack." Since would-be terrorists are unlikely to announce attacks ahead of time, equipping everyone with gas masks might not be the most cost-effective approach.

Also interesting, though by no means earth-shattering, are the gray sidebars near the end of each chapter, which relate the histories of various would-be weapons of mass destruction. Readers learn that, during World War II, Japanese soldiers tested dozens of biological and chemical weapons on their Chinese prisoners, with gruesome results. We are also repeatedly informed that the Soviet Union abrogated the chemical weapons treaties that it signed in order to stew all kinds of deadly concoctions to rain down on the U.S., but that most of the casualties occurred in the former U.S.S.R., when laboratory accidents occasionally led to outbreaks.

Looking at the anthrax letters, the problem, as Frist diagnoses it, is that the U.S. government wasn't "scientifically prepared." Hence the last chapter of his book uses the question-and-answer format to advance an argument about what steps the government needs to take in order to combat future acts of bioterror. For example, the Food and Drug Administration's staff should be increased, and the fda should be given more control to block food shipments from other countries. More funds need to be made available to coordinate medical information. A National Guard-like shock corps of surgeons and experts should be put together to be transported, at a few hours' notice, to any problem spot. And so on.

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June (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46