LAUSR

A contagious disease pandemic has long been ranked high among potential threats to human life and livelihood For example, here is philanthropist Bill Gates at the Munich Security Conference in 2017: “Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast‐moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10–15 years ” In 2005, in the March issue of this journal, the distinguished scholar Vaclav Smil rated a catastrophic infectious disease pandemic as the “transformational” global event most likely to occur over the next half century, easily beating out nuclear war, asteroid impact, etc In the press of more immediate business, warnings like these seem to have had limited effect For many public health authorities, advance preparations for such a contingency have been piecemeal;initial responses, as a result, have been haphazard—as witnessed in many countries in the early months of 2020 in the face of the emerging COVID‐19 pandemic National security establishments, in contrast, would plausibly be more alert, tasked as they are with identifying the nature and comparative scale of all kinds of security threats to the country, natural as well as manmade In the present day, security threats necessarily encompass biothreats In the United States, the Biological Threat Reduction Program within the Department of Defense is one such activity A committee of the National Academy of Sciences was recently asked to advise on aspects of this program Its report, published in April 2020, deals in part with what it terms the changing biothreat landscape An excerpt from this section of the report is reprinted below The attention in the excerpt is on natural origins and transmission of disease, with emphasis on the scale of human and financial costs