The Heavy Cost of Ignoring Biosurveillance.

AuthorMagnuson, Stew

It was Aug. 28, 2012 in a Washington, D.C., hotel near Union Station where the National Defense Industrial Association held its first and only Biosurveillance Conference.

It was lightly attended--if memory serves. I'll be charitable and say there were 75 attendees in the smallish room.

At least one of them--myself--was in the wrong place. Biosurveillance? I thought it would be about sensors. I was expecting to hear about typical defense and homeland security technologies designed to detect bioweapons--something akin to the Department of Homeland Security's BioWatch program, or what the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense wanted. The agenda included Defense Threat Reduction Agency personnel.

No, actually, the attendees were mostly in the public health field, and they were talking about a worldwide database where doctors, public health officials, veterinarians and the like could report what they were seeing as far as new infectious diseases.

They likened the concept to weather reports. The world has a network of sensors that tells meteorologists what's happening in the atmosphere. With the data, they can warn people if a storm is coming and citizens can prepare. The public health officials wanted to do the same for infectious diseases: manmade or natural. And the far-term goal would be to do predictive analysis--just like weather forecasts.

Here is an example: let's say a doctor in China--let's just say Wuhan, China--noticed an unusual number of cases of patients with a new respiratory disease marked by an unusually high fatality rate. He would then input that information into a database accessible to public health officials throughout the world. Then, let's just say, doctors in South Korea or Italy, noticed the same thing. Analysts could connect the dots and sound the alarm. Hospitals could stock up on items such as, let's say, face masks and respirators.

What I learned at that one-day conference ended up being part of a story that ran in the November 2012 issue. NDIA members with their expertise in information technology could have a lot to offer building such a network, I reasoned, so it was worth reporting.

Let's pull some quotes out of that 2012 story.

Harshini Mukundan, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said diseases emerge from people, plants and animals.

"They are all interconnected, and having separate agencies monitoring each one defeats the cause."

Laurie Garrett, an analyst at the...

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