The ADA commends Congressmen Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Candice Miller (R-MI) for introducing the "Dental Emergency Responder Act" (H.R. 903). By taking advantage of dentists' extensive education, training, and professionalism, this would improve America's capacity to respond to natural disasters or terrorist attacks. However, it provides for no funding, but incorporates dentistry by name into federal and state disaster response by deploying dentists during natural or man-made disasters by mobilizing health professionals at a moment's notice to triage and treat victims.

A similar program was implemented during the 1980s where such facilities as dental schools, senior citizen centers, local dental clinics, and even schools could be immediately converted to handle disaster victims. Your editor was the Loyola Dental School Representative to a weekend seminar in Chicago on just such a subject of a nuclear attack in an urban environment. Medical supplies would be stored in such facilities for possible use by trained personnel in the event of such an attack. At that time the government prognosis on casualties following a nuclear attack was that all hospitals, and the ancillary sites, would be overrun with casualties so numerous that it would be impossible to treat even a small percentage of them successfully. The idea was abandoned after that weekend.

This bill expects to utilize all qualified health care personnel with no funding or thought to transporting such personnel to the disaster site(s). This is merely a "feel good" bill that has no study behind it to address the realities or even delineate what type of disasters may be handled in what fashion by what health care personnel. While a good idea, this law needs more focus and thought behind it to work in the real world. When the Katrina disaster occurred in New Orleans, two-thirds of the police force left the city to its own problems, and most of the health care personnel had already left for high ground. Few ever returned.