Biosecurity

Biological threats have the potential to kill millions, cost billions in economic losses, and create political and economic instability, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or manmade. The risk of a catastrophic biological event is magnified by global travel, urbanization, terrorist interest in weapons of mass destruction as well as rapid advances in technology, including risks posed by newly developed or manipulated pathogens with pandemic potential. 

All of these factors taken together create an urgent need to strengthen biosecurity, reduce biological risks posed by advances in technology, create new approaches to improve infectious disease surveillance, and identify and fill gaps to measurably strengthen global health security capabilities.  Despite these challenges, biosecurity remains an under-emphasized and under-financed global security priority.

NTI recognizes that threat reduction is a shared responsibility between governments and the private sector. We raise awareness, advocate for solutions, facilitate implementation of solutions, and foster new thinking about these challenges. Specifically, NTI seeks to reduce biological risks by:

• Defining concrete actions to reduce risks posed by advances in technology and engaging global stakeholders to implement them.
  
• Identifying gaps in the capacity of individual countries to mitigate high-consequence biological events and motivate governments and other stakeholders to fill them.
  
• Developing new approaches for curbing the catastrophic outcomes from a high-consequence biological event, including catalyzing progress toward real-time biosurveillance and pandemic forecasting.
• Increasing international biosecurity capabilities and raising the profile of biosecurity within the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), which is a group of over 60 countries and international organizations dedicated to preventing, detecting, and responding to infectious disease threats.