The United States actively and effectively prevents, prepares for, responds to, recovers from, and mitigates risk from natural, accidental, or deliberate biological threats.
This National Biodefense Strategy brings together and puts in place for the first time, a single coordinated effort to orchestrate the full range of activity that is carried out across the United States Government to protect the American people from biological threats. With National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-14, this strategy explains how the United States Government will manage its activities more effectively to assess, prevent, detect, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats, coordinating its biodefense efforts with those of international partners, industry, academia, non-governmental entities, and the private sector.
The mission of the Federal Government during a biological incident is to save lives, reduce human suffering, protect property and the environment, control the spread of disease, and support community efforts to overcome the physical, emotional, environmental, and economic impacts. This federal mission is contingent upon the coordination with and the success of the community response. This strategy describes the goals and objectives that will guide the United States in assessing, preventing, detecting, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from a biological incident, consistent with its international obligations, including those identified in the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations (2005).
Enhancing the national biodefense enterprise will help protect the United States and its partners abroad from biological incidents, whether deliberate, naturally occurring, or accidental in origin. It will simultaneously build the U.S. innovation base for cutting edge medical countermeasures (MCMs), biosensors and diagnostics, and biosurveillance information technologies, and advance the biomedical industry.
Naturally Occurring Biological Threats. Infectious disease threats do not respect borders. Urbanization, habitat encroachment, and increased and faster travel, coupled with weak health systems, increase the ability of infectious diseases to spread rapidly across the globe. Antimicrobial resistance, novel infectious diseases, and the resurgence and spread of once geographically limited infectious diseases can overwhelm response capacities and make outbreaks harder to control. An infectious disease outbreak—even in the most remote places of the world—could spread rapidly across oceans and continents, directly impacting the U.S. population and its health, security, and prosperity.
Deliberate and Accidental Biological Threats. The use of biological weapons or their proliferation by state or non-state actors presents a significant challenge to our national security, our population, our agriculture, and the environment. Multiple nations have pursued clandestine biological weapons programs and a number of terrorist groups have sought to acquire biological weapons. In many countries around the world, pathogens are stored in laboratories that lack appropriate biosecurity measures where they could be diverted by actors who wish to do harm. Similarly, some laboratories do not have appropriate biocontainment or biosafety protocols, which could lead to an outbreak through a laboratory acquired infection or if a pathogen is accidentally released into the environment. Biological material is ubiquitous and can self-propagate; pathogens are found all over the world—in the environment, animal reservoirs, humans, and laboratories. A natural outbreak can lead quickly to not only a public health crisis, but also a biosecurity vulnerability due to the thousands of clinical samples that are generated during an epidemic, which, if handled without appropriate biosecurity measures, could facilitate the development of a biological weapon.
The evolving biological threat landscape requires a comprehensive approach, and the United States recognizes the following principles:
The National Biodefense Strategy has five goals with associated objectives for strengthening the biodefense enterprise, establishing a layered risk management approach to countering biological threats and incidents.
Goal 1: Enable Risk Awareness to Inform Decision-making Across the Biodefense Enterprise.