Building Careers and Shaping Public Policy

21 June 2004

The Honorable Jim Turner
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Turner:

I am writing on behalf of the IEEE-USA to express our support for your proposed legislation, the Rapid Pathogen Identification to the Delivery of Cures Act (H.R. 4258). In particular, we are supportive of the provisions that call for a report to document a strategy for the development of a pathogen identification system for the purposes of improving safety and security.

We feel it is important that a larger role for technical professionals be expressly included in the bill. A strategic plan of this type requires input from multiple professional disciplines including computational biologists, physicians, bioinformaticians, biomedical engineers, computer scientists and others. Section 304(A)(1) of the bill lists the need for “The identification of the technical impediments.” In this section particularly, technical professionals can make contributions that would uniquely support the development of such a strategy. We also recommend that the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) within the National Institutes of Health be consulted in the development of the report.

IEEE-USA is an organizational unit of the IEEE. It was created in 1973 to advance the public good and promote the careers and public-policy interests of the more than 225,000 technology professionals who are U.S. members of the IEEE. The IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional society. For more information, go to http://www.ieeeusa.org.

We would be delighted to assist you further in supporting this legislation. Please feel free to contact Deborah Rudolph at 202-785-0017, x8332.

Sincerely,

John W. Steadman, Ph.D., P.E.