Publications

According to the US National Bioeconomy Blueprint (2012), applications emerging from synthetic biology and other biotechnologies “can allow Americans to live longer, healthier lives, reduce our dependence on oil, address environmental challenges, transform manufacturing processes, and increase the productivity and scope of the agricultural sector while growing new jobs and industries.”(p1) In addition to benefits to these diverse aspects of American life, biotechnology's potential effect on growing the economy is thought to be immense. Synthetic biology, a technical area that aims to make biology more useful and easier to engineer, is a top 10 key technology for the 21st century, according to the World Economic Forum. BCC Research, a market analysis company, expects the synthetic biology market to grow rapidly from $2.7 billion in 2013 to $11.8 billion in 2018, with a compound annual growth rate of 34.4% over a 5-year period from 2013 to 2018.

In the past 15 years, a series of infectious disease emergencies—the anthrax attacks in 2001, the rapid global spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic, the emergence and international spread of the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), the largest Ebola epidemic on record, and the emergence and spread of Zika virus—have increased global political concerns about emerging infectious disease threats and deliberate epidemics. Among these events, Ebola and Zika serve as stark reminders that, if left unchecked, infectious disease outbreaks that originate in one country can produce profound international human, political, and economic consequences. Limited public health and healthcare infrastructure in West Africa quickly enabled Ebola to rapidly spread to multiple countries, resulting in unprecedented levels of illness and death. The suffering caused by the epidemic led to social unrest and economic distress that threatened to undermine decades of US investment aimed at bringing political stability to the region. To help end the epidemic, the US Congress appropriated more than $5 billion in emergency funds.

Beginning in 2017, new federal leadership can take important steps to vitalize the role of private citizens and businesses as well as faith-based and community-based organizations in the larger public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) enterprise. A broad consensus exists that government on its own cannot effectively and equitably manage epidemics and disasters. Past events repeatedly demonstrate that actions by citizens and civic groups have helped to curtail the impacts of extreme events and to prompt a more complete recovery from mass trauma. Nonetheless, the full potential of nongovernment forces in disaster readiness, response, and recovery has yet to be realized. Community engagement can enhance the quality of emergency planning, improve protections for vulnerable populations, multiply preparedness and response assets, and, ultimately, save more lives. The incoming administration in concert with Congress has an immense opportunity to enhance the country's resilience to catastrophic health events by steadily investing in robust partnerships between local public health authorities and the communities they serve.

Over the past 10 years, US health security has been threatened by a series of infectious disease events: the 2009 influenza outbreak, the emergence of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the rapid spread of Zika virus throughout the Americas. In each of these events, inadequate information has delayed initial detection of the outbreak, and a lack of understanding about the underlying epidemiology of the viruses hindered control efforts. As the ongoing US response to Zika illustrates, delays in detecting and responding to outbreaks can exacerbate their human and economic tolls. While the United States continues to struggle to understand how Zika virus can spread and cause serious disease, more than 37,000 cases have already been identified in the United States and its territories. Each one of these cases must be investigated by health authorities to ensure that they do not spread their infection. In particular, pregnant women must be followed closely, as Zika can cause fetal death or severe birth defects. It is estimated that each baby who is born with Zika-related birth defects will cost families and the US healthcare system up to $10 million.

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the leadership, resources, and expertise that public health agencies across the country can bring to bear on the response to infectious disease emergencies and other catastrophic events took on additional urgency and importance. In light of this expanded mission, Congress appropriated funds to support public health preparedness at the state and local levels, one result of which was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) program. Several recent infectious disease emergencies—chief among them the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and isolated cases in the United States (2014-15) and the ongoing Zika virus pandemic—have challenged national health security and demonstrated a need for continued investment in domestic public health preparedness and response infrastructure.

Preparing our hospitals and other healthcare facilities for disasters is a national security priority. Disasters occur nearly every day in the United States, and the frequency is increasing. This includes such diverse events as storms, droughts, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, chemical and industrial accidents, burns, mass shootings and bombings, and epidemics. All sickened or injured people require a well-prepared public health and healthcare system. The number of people killed by disasters depends not only on the severity of the event itself but also on our ability to respond effectively and treat the ill or injured. This is true of all disasters, whether they are natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes or manmade disasters like terrorism. It is also true of infectious disease epidemics, whether of natural or manmade origin.

Following the anthrax and 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, Presidents Bush and Obama both prioritized and supported investment in federal programs aimed at improving US defenses against health security threats, including major disasters; naturally occurring infectious disease epidemics; accidental releases of chemical, biological, or radiological materials; and chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) terrorism.

There are a range of worrisome threats to US health and national security—worrisome because they have the potential to cause widespread disruption and damage to the public's health and to the US and global economies. These threats include major natural hazards like large earthquakes and hurricanes and infectious disease pandemics; accidental threats, including technological failures, such as nuclear power plant disasters like Three Mile Island and Fukushima; and intentional attacks by thinking adversaries, including terrorist use of biological, chemical, or nuclear/radiological weapons.

Preventing the development and use of biological weapons should continue to be a top priority for the nation. There are fundamental issues that make prevention difficult, however. The knowledge, materials, and technologies needed to make and use a biological weapon are readily accessible around the world. Pathogens are ubiquitous in nature and can be found in hospital and research laboratories, scientific culture collections, and in sick people and animals everywhere. It is now possible to synthesize pathogens from scratch, particularly viruses, with technologies that are inexpensive and globally available. The skills and equipment for making a biological weapon are largely the same as those required for progress in medicine, agriculture, and other fields and are required for future economic prosperity for the nation, so they cannot be locked away. Efforts that might be useful in deterring terrorist groups will be different than those targeted toward nation states—and every nation state is presumed to have the technical and financial resources to have a biological weapons program should they choose to embark on one.

Biosafety—keeping laboratory workers, the community, and the environment safe—is a crosscutting need for all research activities, as well as an important research and policy area with medical, political, and security consequences. As such, it requires a dedicated plan for the US government. One reason biosafety is attracting more attention now is because it may be a limiting factor in the development of advanced biotechnologies. Many potential new biotechnology applications with biomedical and economic implications are intended to be used outside the laboratory and released into the environment, so their safety cannot rely on traditional laboratory containment. They are meant to be “outside.” Applications such as mosquito control, agriculture, pollution remediation, mining, biofuels, medications that use synthetic organisms to treat gastrointestinal diseases, or even the re-creation of extinct animals require synthetic organisms to be in the environment, where they can interact with other living things. These applications may be tremendously beneficial and may spur economic development, but if biosafety risks are not addressed and carefully thought through, they could yield unintended and accidental consequences.

In an increasingly interconnected world, the potential for infectious diseases to spread internationally is an inescapable fact. The country will face one or more infectious disease health threats over the course of the next administration. Dealing with these threats will require science-based assessment, judicious management, and effective risk communication.

This chapter chronicles the major normative and operational developments engaged in by international organizations in the field of democratic governance. We observe that democratic norms are being articulated and acted upon by IOs. As evidence, we look to the development of democracy’s normative roots as well as the following operational activities: electoral assistance, the good governance agenda of development programs, and peacebuilding. 

As US public health faces increasing threats from outbreaks, impending changes to the healthcare landscape in the United States may alter the way that health departments are able to detect and control some of the most common infectious diseases. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made significant changes in the way health care is provided in the United States. While many of the clinical, economic, and policy implications of the ACA are well described, there has been limited analysis of changes, if any, in the surveillance and control of infectious diseases of public health importance—such as tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections, and HIV—that are anticipated or occurring as the ACA is implemented across the United States. To address these questions, we reviewed the literature for evidence of changing trends and conducted 66 semi-structured, not-for-attribution interviews with 82 participants from healthcare systems; academia; federal, state, and local public health agencies; and professional and nongovernmental organizations across the United States. This analysis identifies several ways in which ACA implementation has not fully addressed the public health needs associated with diagnosis, treatment, surveillance, and control of infectious diseases of public health importance.

How the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other US government officials convey information about medical countermeasures (MCMs) will affect uptake, compliance, and ultimately survival in the aftermath of a natural disease emergency or a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) attack. Moreover, effective communication regarding MCMs has the potential to strengthen psychological resilience as well as engender public trust in science, government, and public health.

Synthetic biology aims to make biology easier to engineer and to program. Thanks to advances in computing power, the ability to make long tracts of DNA, new tools like CRISPR that can be used to edit genomes, and the enthusiasm of young scientists and even amateurs who want to enter the field, synthetic biology is poised to change the future of medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing. Yet, while this new field promises vast opportunities and benefits, there are also risks. There are biosecurity risks that these technologies will be deliberately used for harm; safety risks to people and the environment; ethical and social considerations for how to apply these technologies; and there are risks to the competitiveness of nations that do not invest in these technologies that are likely to spur economic growth. This volume is dedicated to a discussion of what can be done to minimize risks and maximize the benefits of synthetic biology.

On August 19, DA Henderson, leader of the successful-against-all-odds World Health Organization's global eradication campaign against smallpox, died at the age of 87. My colleagues and I at our Center will miss him very much. I wanted to reflect on some of the amazing things he did in his life and on a few of the personal characteristics that helped him contribute so much for so long.

During the past 2 years, back-to-back epidemics of Ebola and Zika have stunned even seasoned public health officials with unprecedented levels of illness and death that have been associated with these events. Both viruses, previously thought to cause only limited outbreaks, surprised the people of the world with a seemingly sudden ability to spread across multiple countries and cause illness in new, previously unthinkable ways. As we struggle to understand both the scale and impact of the Zika and Ebola crises, we are forced to once again ask: how did this happen and what can we do to prevent the next one? 

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is an emerging pathogen, first recognized in 2012, with a high case fatality risk, no vaccine, and no treatment beyond supportive care. We estimated the relative risks of death and severe disease among MERS-CoV patients in the Middle East between 2012 and 2015 for several risk factors, using Poisson regression with robust variance and a bootstrap-based expectation maximization algorithm to handle extensive missing data. Increased age and underlying comorbidity were risk factors for both death and severe disease, while cases arising in Saudi Arabia were more likely to be severe. Cases occurring later in the emergence of MERS-CoV and among health-care workers were less serious. This study represents an attempt to estimate risk factors for an emerging infectious disease using open data and to address some of the uncertainty surrounding MERS-CoV epidemiology.

The proportion of extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB) cases in the United States (US) has been rising due to a slower rate of decline in EPTB compared to pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). The purpose of this study was to characterise the clinical and treatment differences between EPTB and PTB patients, and identify patient factors associated with EPTB.

On December 2-3, 2015, the UPMC Center for Health Security hosted the second meeting of Track II biosecurity dialogue between the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The meeting took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and was co-sponsored by the Malaysian Ministry of Health (MOH). The dialogue is supported by the Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC) of the Center on Contemporary Conflict, sponsored by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

The purpose of the second meeting of the dialogue – which is the focus of this report – was to engage participants in deeper conversations around the unique biosecurity landscapes of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the US; examine ongoing national, regional, and global biosecurity threats; identify and critique current policies and approaches to biological threat mitigation; and exchange best practices in biorisk management to strengthen responses to emerging and evolving biological threats. The dialogue featured participants representing various levels of academia, and government, including experts in the life sciences, defense, public health, animal health, journalism, medicine, terrorism, and security.