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Lesniak Chandra

NBIC is charged with enhancing the capability of the Federal Government to enable early warning and shared situational awareness of acute biological events to support better decisions through rapid identification, characterization, localization, and tracking. A key aspect of this mission is the requirement to integrate and collaborate with federal and, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government agencies. NBIC develops and disseminates a variety of products to its stakeholders, including daily reports, ad-hoc reports, analytic collaborations, and leadership briefings upon request. Stakeholders interact with and utilize NBIC’s products in different ways, depending on the mission and jurisdiction involved. Specific collaborations with individual stakeholders are most frequent and evident during major infectious disease events, such as the recent Zika epidemic in the Americas and the associated microcephaly and other neurological disorders PHEIC. Collaborative efforts and known outcomes among varying levels of government are described in detail below in order to highlight NBIC’s integration focus and capabilities in this role.

Objective:

An important part of the National Biosurveillance Integration Center’s (NBIC) mission is collaboration with federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments for the purpose of enhancing early warning, shared situational awareness, and related decision support for infectious disease events. Several such collaborations occurred at multiple jurisdictional levels during the recent Zika epidemic in the Americas and the associated microcephaly and other neurological disorders Public Health Event of International Concern (PHEIC). The collaborations and their known outcomes from this major infectious disease event are described below, and NBIC stands ready to support similar efforts for future events.

Submitted by elamb on

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) has the responsibility to integrate, analyze, and share the nation’s biosurveillance information provided from capabilities distributed across public and private sectors. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts. In addition to its interagency partners, NBIC supports the Office of Health Affairs and DHS components responsible for safeguarding U.S. ports of entry. More than 150 U.S. international airports process an estimated two billion passengers and 50 million metric tons of cargo arriving in the U.S. from more than 1,000 international airports located outside the U.S. Entry and customs screening are points where travelers from international destinations pass; a logical location for assessing health of incoming travelers in order to identify and control import of diseases of emerging diseases. NBIC examined peer-reviewed literature, region-specific disease spectrum/frequency, and air travel patterns to assess options for ports of entry health screening as well as the challenges and potential benefits for active screening programs.

Objective

NBIC analysts evaluated the options and effectiveness of airport symptom-based health screening programs available during emerging disease outbreaks occurring outside the U.S.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

The NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact. NBIC serves as a bridge between Federal, State, Local, Territorial, and Tribal entities to conduct biosurveillance across human, animal, plant, and environmental domains. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts.

To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a variety of data sets, including open source information, to provide comprehensive coverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBIC Biofeeds is a digital tool designed to improve the efficiency of reviewing and analyzing large volumes of open source reporting by biosurveillance analysts on a daily basis; moreover, the system provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored feeds allowing NBIC to better meet the specific information needs of individual, interagency partners. The tool is currently under development by the Department of Energy (DOE), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and it is in a testing and evaluation phase supported by NBIC biosurveillance subject matter experts. Integration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) is also underway. NBIC Biofeeds Version 1 is expected to be fully operational in Fiscal Year 2017. 

Objective

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is developing a scalable, flexible open source data collection, analysis, and dissemination tool to support biosurveillance operations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its federal interagency partners. 

Submitted by Magou on
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