Book Description

"The United States has a critical national security interest in preserving the health of its population, livestock, crops, and natural resources. Biosurveillance is the method used to detect, monitor and respond to the array of threats to our national security from natural, accidental, and intentional origins. On October 18, 2007, the White House released Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21 (HSPD-21) which mandates the development of a nationwide, robust, and integrated biosurveillance capability for human health, with connections to international disease surveillance systems, in order to provide early warning and ongoing characterization of disease outbreaks in near real-time. Additionally, HSPD-21 requires the establishment of a federal advisory committee, including representatives from state and local government public health authorities and appropriate private sector health care entities, in order to ensure that the federal government is enhancing state and local government public health surveillance capability. In order to meet this mandate, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was designated the lead to develop the National Biosurveillance Strategy for Human Health and establish the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS). NBAS is comprised of prominent public and private biosurveillance stakeholders and contributors and was created by the Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD), CDC on May 1, 2008. As a subcommittee to the ACD, the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee provides counsel to the ACD regarding the broad range of issues impacting the development and implementation of a nationwide biosurveillance strategy for human health. The membership of the NBAS ensures diverse perspectives important to the development of the strategy, including those from government, public health, health care delivery, academia and others, are reflected in the strategy's plans. The NBAS provides leadership and guidance to the National Biosurveillance Strategy for Human Health. The NBAS has begun to advance recommendations to improve the nation's biosurveillance capability by developing innovative and practical solutions to challenges in the following areas: Attracting, developing and retaining a cross-trained and multi-talented workforce; Collaborating with global partners to strengthen local capabilities to rapidly identify and contain emerging health threats; Enhancing diagnostics and laboratory electronic information exchange; Improving exchange of information between public health and clinical medicine activities to improve accuracy and timeliness of diagnosis and reporting of health events; Examining the role of biosurveillance in addressing zoonotic and vector-borne diseases and food security; Integrating clinical and health information with environmental monitoring of air, toxin, microbiological disease threats, water quality, and infrastructure and geological disasters; Applying new technological advances in bioinformatics, data mining, aberration detection, digital scanning of open source information, analysis, and visualization methods while being mindful of important privacy concerns; Identifying solutions to cross-sector and intergovernmental collaborations for improving biosurveillance capability "--Page i.