Bioterrorism
Paula J. Olsiewski, Program Director
Other Important Grants in the Bioterrorism Program
Education. The Foundation is supporting the bioterrorism program at the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy at West Point. The Center is developing a modular bioterrorism curriculum. For additional information, see http://www.ctc.usma.edu/bioterrorism_default.asp.
Emergency Management. The foundation has supported a limited number of projects aimed at helping the emergency management community.
A grant in 2005 to the Council for Excellence in Government is supporting the Big City Managers’ Learning and Exchange Forum. Emergency managers from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Washington, DC, and other cities are participating in this project.
In the winter of 2002, the Foundation approved a grant to George Washington University to define specific operational concepts for mass casualty regional care. In seven short months, GWU prepared and refined the “Medical and Health Incident Management (MaHIM) System”. MaHIM is a "tool kit" for communities preparing emergency response plans. It provides a single, comprehensive and adaptable system for medical management in emergencies and disasters. It delineates each critical operational function that emergency management and the health and medical sectors must address to adequately manage a mass casualty incident. The full report can be found at http://www.gwu.edu/~icdrm/publications/MaHIM%20V2%20final%20report%20sec%202.pdf.
In the summer of 2001, the Foundation awarded a grant to The City of New York Office of Emergency Management to cover pre-conference administrative and printing expenses for the "Urban Emergency Management" conference and future work on bioterrorism preparedness. However, the tragic events of September 11, 2001 resulted in the cancellation of the conference.
Syndromic Surveillance. One of the key difficulties in bioterrorism is detection, the difficulty of knowing that an attack is happening. In March 2002 and March 2003, the Trustees approved funding to a consortium of institutions led by the New York Academy of Medicine, in collaboration with the New York City Department of Health and the University of Connecticut, to develop and disseminate easy-to-use syndromic surveillance software to help provide early warnings of a bioterrorist attack or disease outbreak. The software package was demonstrated and critiqued at The National Syndromic Surveillance Conference in September 2002 with over 400 public health practitioners, academics, military and private industry personnel attending. The syndromic surveillance software package was released in October 2002 and is available free of charge at http://srab.cancer.gov/satscan. The second National Syndromic Surveillance Conference was held at the New York Academy of Medicine in October 2003 and included a hands-on, three-day workshop aimed at and limited to public health practitioners from the state and local level who are interested in building a syndromic surveillance system. A special website devoted to the syndromic surveillance community was developed and launched in 2003 (http://www.syndromic.org).
In 2005, the Foundation awarded support to the Tufts Health Care Institute to develop a professional society for the advancement of the science of syndromic surveillance and the International Society for Disease Surveillance was founded. “The mission of the International Society for Disease Surveillance is to improve population health by advancing the field of disease surveillance. In support of this mission, the Society provides an educational and scientific forum where epidemiologists, informaticists, public health practitioners, health care providers, statisticians, and others can work together to explore and address population health monitoring across institutional and professional boundaries.” The new society oversees the website and annual conference.
Other grants in syndromic surveillance include a grant to researchers at Harvard University to improve syndromic surveillance methods by developing a prototype tool for integrating multiple signals together and sounding alarms. In June 2003, the trustees approved a grant to the Realtime Outbreak Detection Surveillance Laboratory (http://www.health.pitt.edu/rods/) in support of their work to build a national retail data system for public health surveillance to help detect bioterrorist or naturally occurring events. The Foundation does not anticipate funding additional work in syndromic surveillance at this time.
Other Bioterrorism Grants:
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research: To improve terrorism preparedness by educating the law enforcement community about the analyses and recommendations of the Center for Tactical Counterterrorism. (2004)
Spectrum BD Consulting: To support a workshop of thought leaders in bioterrorism and homeland security. (2003)
Brookings Institution: To develop and test a model of selective vaccination and quarantine. (2002)
Georgia Tech Research Corporation: To fund proof of concept development of a real time anthrax spore detector. (2002)
New York Biotechnology Association: Planning grant to develop concepts for the Civilian Medical Reserve Corps. (2002)
Center for the Study of the Presidency: To support a roundtable series on issues of homeland security and bioterrorism. (2003)