Emerging Infectious Diseases Study
Abstract
IDA assessed the potential risk to US military forces and objectives posed by outbreaks of emerging infectious disease and recommended initiatives to improve DOD capabilities to mitigate that risk. IDA developed a qualitative set of producibility, employability, and effectiveness characteristics of concern for evaluating the potential risk of EIDs, and conducted a quantitative assessment of operational impact using an IDA-developed model of contagious disease dynamics. The modeling results indicated that some emerging diseases could indeed threaten US military forces and objectives in a variety of scenarios including natural outbreaks, improvised biological operations, and biological warfare attacks. The IDA team also found that outbreak response capabilities could be easily ranked in terms of effectiveness, with medical countermeasures providing much more effective than procedural controls such as restriction of movement. Moreover, to be effective, response capabilities needed to be implemented rapidly, at a time when there would be few symptomatic cases of illness to serve as triggers. The research team used this latter finding to recommend requirements for biosurveillance initiatives intended to detect disease outbreaks.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1165599
Entities
People
- Jeffrey H. Grotte
- Julia K. Burr
- Katherine M. Sixt
- Lucas A. Laviolet
- Monica A. Smith
- Robert L. Cubeta
Organizations
- Institute for Defense Analyses