As health departments around the state waited earlier this month to see how $18 million in federal bioterrorism preparedness funding is divided, Island County health officials were set to take what they got and run with it.

Island County Health Officer Roger Case said said last week that the grant dispersal Gov. Gary Locke approved April 15 is the second allotment in a two-pronged plan intended to improve the response capabilities of health agencies around the state.

For its part, Island County used the initial $50,000 of federal money to help the county “do assessments and bringing entities together around the issue of bioterrorism.”

In the preliminary plan for this month’s grant dispersal, the state includes Island County in a bloc of five regional health departments — led by Snohomish County — that will share $758,000 in federal bioterrorism funding. According to Snohomish Health Director Ward Hinds, the main goal of the spending is to fill in the gaps in statewide response capacities by bringing everyone up to at least a minimum level of competency.

The state’s plan for dispersing the $18 million package has come under fire recently, mostly by King County officials who feel that their planned allocation of $1.6 million doesn’t take into account their higher risk of being targeted for a bioterrorism event. Case said such complaints are nothing new.

“Whenever there’s money out there, everybody wants to get at it,” he said. Such clamoring for funding may be exacerbated at this point by recent statewide budget cuts. However, Case said, he thinks this time around “our region is going to fare fairly well, truth be told.”

Case said he thinks health officials in the five-county block — which also includes San Juan, Skagit and Whatcom counties — are relatively well-prepared to take what the state gives them and implement a comprehensive plan.

“We’ve already got some ideas on how we’re going to handle what we need to do,” Case said.

The focus of this batch of spending, Case said, is on bolstering Island County’s ability to handle any sort of communicable disease outbreak, a phrase which he uses intentionally.

“Basically, we see bioterrorism as only a part of what our whole communicable disease outbreak program addresses,” Case said.

Without the terrorism element of an event, Case said, disease outbreaks are already under the auspices of local health departments.

“The terror part of the thing is by the people who are perpetrating this, because they know when, where and how,” Case said. “Otherwise, it’s a natural phenomenon that we’ve been dealing with all along.”

What Island County’s health department needs to be sufficiently prepared for a communicable disease outbreak “is not gas masks,” Case said, but more staff, better equipment and a means of educating the public about responses to and prevention of bioterrorist events.

Case said that high on the list would be the acquisition or access to an epidemiologist who could be used both as an expert and an educator. “Epidemiologists are hard to come by,” he said, “but when you need them, you need them.”

Such a person would most likely split his or her time among a handful of counties, Case said.

Some other high-priority items on the health department’s wish list are a lab that can handle major disease outbreaks, drug stockpiles and more public health nurses. Case said education is always a big component of any preparedness program.

“This kind of money will allow us to hire enough people that we can go out at the local level,” he said. “Prevention is what we’re after, but we don’t have the opportunity to do that right now.”