The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosts a regional multilateral biosecurity dialogue in Southeast Asia that includes experts from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the United States. The dialogue aims to promote engagement and collaboration on current and emerging biosecurity issues in order to improve national and regional preparedness and response to natural, accidental, and deliberate biological events.
Dialogue countries consider both the challenges and benefits associated with Southeast Asia’s increasingly complex biosecurity landscape, including natural outbreaks of emerging and potential pandemic pathogens, porous borders and highly mobile populations, increasing terrorist threats, rapidly growing biotechnology industry and economy, and emerging tools and capabilities to combat future threats. Participants include current and former senior government officials and other subject matter experts, who represent a broad scope of expertise, including in human, animal, plant, and environmental health; defense, national security, and law enforcement; biology and biotechnology; international relations and foreign policy; WMD nonproliferation; and the media.
This “Track II” dialogue (ie, not formal government-to-government engagement) originated in 2014 as a bilateral effort, facilitated by the Center, between Singapore and the United States. It expanded to include Malaysia and Indonesia in 2015 and the Philippines and Thailand in 2017. Track II dialogues are an opportunity for respected, experienced stakeholders to collectively identify and debate important issues that merit raising to the level of official policy engagement between and among governments (ie, “Track I”). This dialogue support participants’ efforts to strengthen cross-border collaborations and engage senior leadership in their home countries, with the aim of establishing and maintaining regional resilience to a broad scope of biosecurity threats.
Project team lead: Anita Cicero, JD
Project team: Tom Inglesby, MD; Matthew P. Shearer, MPH; Benjamin Wakefield, MSc
Project supported by: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, US Department of Defense
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