United States biological defense program

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The United States Biological Defense Program—in recent years also called the National Biodefense Strategy—refers to the collective effort by all levels of government, along with private enterprise and other stakeholders, in the United States to carry out biodefense activities.

Biodefense is a system of planned actions to counter and reduce the risk of biological threats and to prepare, respond to, and recover from them if they happen. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2016 required high-level officials across the federal government to create a national biodefense strategy together. As a result, in 2018 the National Biodefense Strategy was released by President Donald J. Trump. In essence, the strategy comprises the U.S. biological defense program in that it is the official framework that provides a "single coordinated effort" to coordinate all biodefense activities across the federal government. To execute the strategy, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum on the Support for National Biodefense, which puts the specific directives and rules in place for carrying out the plans written in the strategy. The National Biodefense Strategy elevated natural outbreaks as a vital component of the U.S. biological defense program for the first time, mostly because of the significant risk that natural outbreaks pose to civilian, animal and agricultural populations across the country.^[1]

The U.S. Biological Defense Program began as a small defensive effort that parallels the country's offensive biological weapons development and production program, active since 1943. Organizationally, the medical defense research effort was pursued first (1956–1969) by the U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU) and later, after publicly known discontinuation of the offensive program, by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Both of these units were located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories were headquartered. The current mission is multi-agency, not exclusively military, and is purely to develop defensive measures against bio-agents, as opposed to the former bio-weapons development program.

In 1951, due to biological warfare concerns arising from the Korean War, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a hands-on two-year postgraduate training program in epidemiology, with a focus on field work.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, and the consequent expansion of federal bio-defense expenditures, USAMRIID has been joined at Fort Detrick by sister bio-defense agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (NIAID's Integrated Research Facility) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center and the National Bioforensic Analysis Center). These—along with the much older Foreign Disease Weed Science Research Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture—now constitute the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR).

Broadly defined, the "United States Biological Defense Program" now also encompasses all federal-level programs and efforts to monitor, prevent, and contain naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks of widespread public health concern. These include efforts to forestall large-scale disasters^[2] such as flu pandemics and other "emerging infections" such as novel pathogens or those imported from other countries.