Mapping stakeholders and policies in response to deliberate biological events.

BACKGROUND

Recent infectious disease outbreaks have brought increased attention to the need to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to natural biological threats. However, deliberate biological events also represent a significant global threat, but have received relatively little attention. While the Biological Weapons Convention provides a foundation for the response to deliberate biological events, the political mechanisms to respond to and recover from such an event are poorly defined.

METHODS

We performed an analysis of the epidemiological timeline, the international policies triggered as a notional deliberate biological event unfolds, and the corresponding stakeholders and mandates assigned by each policy.

FINDINGS

The results of this analysis identify a significant gap in both policy and stakeholder mandates: there is no single policy nor stakeholder mandate for leading and coordinating response activities associated with a deliberate biological event. These results were visualized using an open source web-based tool published at https://dbe.talusanalytics.com.

INTERPRETATION

While there are organizations and stakeholders responsible for leading security or public health response, these roles are non-overlapping and are led by organizations not with limited interaction outside such events. The lack of mandates highlights a gap in the mechanisms available to coordinate response and a gap in guidance for managing the response. The results of the analysis corroborate anecdotal evidence from stakeholder meetings and highlight a critical need and gap in deliberate biological response policy.