State and local homeland security and public safety officials will soon have a new tool to increase their situational awareness during events involving natural and manmade biological agents.
The Biosurveillance Common Operating Picture (BCOP) is being tested by a select group of state fusion centers for operational testing and evaluation. Following successful completion of testing and evaluation, the National Biosurveillance Integration Center, which operates the system, expects to offer BCOP to all state fusion centers this summer via the federal government’s Homeland Security Information Network. The expanded system is expected to support 20,000 users.
BCOP is available to federal agencies involved with the response to public health emergencies as they affect operations of the economy’s different sectors.
Photo: The Biosurveillance Common Operating Picture, which displays data from a variety of sources in a single window to provide increased situational awareness of biological and disease-related events, is based on a framework developed by the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense that has been used for a variety of applications. Courtesy of the FAZD Center.
Brought online as the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 began, BCOP draws on information from across the intelligence community, public health departments as well as news and academic articles to give decision-makers across the federal government an idea of the event’s potential impact so they can provide the nation with appropriate guidance.
In addition to disease surveillance information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, BCOP presents food inspection and animal disease information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; reports from Veterans Affairs hospitals; information on infections and countermeasures being employed in the nation’s schools from the Department of Education; and information from myriad other federal agencies.
Information ingested into BCOP also includes data on disasters in one part of the world that may affect another, and because of the connected nature of the economy could have an impact on the United States’ security. For example, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull disrupted air travel across Europe, costing an estimated $500 million per day, National Public Radio reported.
BCOP allows agencies to predict what might happen to the U.S. economy as New Zealand runs short of H1N1 vaccine, which is partly sourced from France. “We’re real interested about what’s the impact about being short on vaccine with a major ally, major trading partner and part of the Commonwealth set of nations,” said a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official. “How does that affect their flu season, and what are we going to look at when we get to September, October, November and our next flu season?”
The National Biosurveillance Integration Center has also begun looking at ways to track incidence of illness and possible exposure to biological agents from reports on Twitter. “Now you have the issue in there of what is valid and verifiable, but you can’t get past the fact that you have a knot in the population complaining,” the official said. “Good, bad or indifferent, does that draw your attention to it and queue you to look for the public health reporting, the animal health reporting, some sort of official reporting that would help you create an accurate picture?”
Prior to the implementation of BCOP, there was no one place authorities could turn to get an accurate picture of an epidemic. “The other pictures that you could get would require you to go to four or five, six, eight different places,” the official said. “The flipside of that is if somebody organizes that data and applies not only the science but kind of the white collar, blue collar side of the picture. What’s actually happening on the street? What’s actually happening to affect trucking and delivery?”
And that view includes the context of events and the historical background including possible precedents that allow decision-makers to take action more quickly.
According to Bob Hooks, a deputy assistant secretary in the DHS’ Office of Health Affairs, the biggest impact of BCOP was to demonstrate to decision-makers the value of having a consolidated picture available to them during the H1N1 outbreak. “In the first wave, more so than in the second wave, we spent a lot of time collecting, filtering data into information rather than having information readily available and spending the available hours on thoughtful decision-making,” he said.
In addition to allowing first responders, public health authorities and decision-makers to access a common operating picture, BCOP also has the potential for improving training and creating "virtual veterans" who can respond more quickly. “It will allow them to become familiar with it and access different sites or different data on a daily basis and train using it so they can then be very familiar with it and have no start up time when an outbreak actually occurs,” said Tammy Beckham, interim director of the National Center for Foreign Animal and Zoonotic Disease Defense.
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