Physical Approaches to Civilian Biodefense: Identifying Potential Preparedness Measures for Challenging Biological...

Although progress in biological sciences and technologies will offer more opportunities to improve human well-being in the coming decades, this progress may also lower barriers that are blocking bad actors from engineering pathogens to cause destruction. In severe cases, the harms of future biological attacks may approach the magnitudes of the worst plagues of history-from the devastation wrought by the Black Death to the epidemics that decimated Mesoamerican societies after initial European contact. In this study, the authors offer initial frameworks for thinking about how the United States could achieve resilience against three biological threat scenarios: (1) a fast scenario, challenging countermeasures with a rapidly spreading outbreak of a lethal human-to-human-transmissible pathogen; (2) a silent scenario, challenging detection with a pathogen that infects much of the population before infected people display visible symptoms; and (3) a saturating scenario, challenging countermeasures involving a pathogen that replicates and persists in the environment. The authors recommend actions that governments and civil society can take to work toward resilience, including more in-depth research to better understand these scenarios and possible defenses.