AUGUSTA – Lawmakers will likely be asked to overhaul the state’s public health laws to ensure that Maine can respond to any potential terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, says the director of the Bureau of Health.

“We were reviewing Maine’s laws even before the [Centers for Disease Control] put out a proposed model law,” said Dr. Dora Mills. “I am still reviewing it and the Attorney General’s Office is reviewing it and I expect we will propose using at least some portions of the model.”

Attorney General Steven Rowe said his office has been reviewing all state laws after the terrorist attack in September. He said some of Maine’s laws are old and need revision.

“Some of the laws dealing with public health are written to deal with an outbreak of a contagious disease,” he said, “but not one that is being spread deliberately as a weapon.”

Mills agreed and said her office is working with Rowe’s staff to propose changes to lawmakers in January. She said some of the proposals in the CDC model, drafted by a team led by Lawrence Gostin, director of The Public Health Law Center at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities, are already included in state law.

While the federal government funded the study that led to the model law, it has little power to act in a public health emergency, Gostin said. The U.S. Constitution vests most power in this area to the states as part of their general police powers.

Public health experts were warning before the September terrorist attacks that the United States was not ready to deal with the wide range of problems that would occur after an assault with biological weapons.

“Nothing in the realm of natural catastrophes or man-made disasters rivals the complex problems of response that would follow a bioweapons attack against a civilian population. The consequence of such an attack would be an epidemic, and, in this country, we have had little experience in coping with epidemics,” said Dr. Donald Henderson, director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins, in testimony to Congress.

“In fact, no city has had to deal with a truly serious epidemic accompanied by large numbers of cases and deaths since the 1918 influenza epidemic, more than two generations ago.”

Mills said Maine’s current laws give broad emergency powers to the governor to order a quarantine, but some of the language is not as clear as in the model law. She said if terrorists used a contagious disease like smallpox as a weapon, people would have to be quarantined.

“This model sets out a clear way to proceed,” she said, “and it is important the law from one state to another is similar, because smallpox knows no boundary.”

The model law lists the sweeping powers a governor would have in a public health emergency. Drug supplies could be seized and rationed and hospitals or other facilities could be taken over by the state to contain the outbreak. A building could be ordered decontaminated, or destroyed.

Individuals could be forced to undergo medical examination, be vaccinated or given treatment. A person could be jailed for not following an order during the public health emergency.

The model legislation does give a person the right to appeal his or her isolation or quarantine, but the person would be quarantined or isolated while the appeals process proceeds.

“Some of the things they propose in the model will certainly upset some people,” Mills said. “I am concerned about some myself.”

The forced vaccination or medical care under the model law when the contagious disease poses a public health threat does not have an appeals process, and that has civil libertarians concerned.

“I certainly hope Maine does not take away basic civil liberties in order to fight terrorism,” said Sally Sutton, executive director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union. “I am impressed with some of the appeals provisions in the model law, but I am also concerned with some of the proposals.”

Sutton said the MCLU would carefully review any changes in Maine law that Mills or the attorney general propose. She said while there may be changes in Maine law needed to respond to a terrorist attack using biological weapons, she cautioned any changes must meet a high standard of protecting individual rights.

There are several other provisions in the model law that may raise concerns.

For example, public health officials would get the right to monitor personal information as they sought to track the cause of a disease outbreak and try to determine if bioterrorism was involved. That could lead to a pharmacist being required to report the names and addresses of patients buying a certain medicine.

“With the anthrax scare we have asked pharmacists to inform us of prescriptions for Cipro,” Mills said. “We contacted the doctors to convince them they should not be writing these prescriptions.”

She said there was a concern people might hoard the powerful antibiotic even though they had no illness warranting the drug. She said it was an action taken by many public health officials across the country.

“We had cooperation on this,” she said, “it is uncertain we could have ordered it. That’s one reason we are reviewing all our public health laws.”

Gosten said the model law is not intended as a “one size fits all.”