Overdue Outbreak Detection System Leaves Patchwork Defense

The U.S. should have had a nationwide network to monitor for the next viral outbreak or biological threat a decade ago. It still doesn't. Instead, public health leaders make do with a patchwork system while waiting for the Department of Health and Human Services races to get its integrated network in service by a new 2023 congressional deadline. Until that nationwide monitoring system is in place, the U.S. runs the risk that a biological threat like a disease outbreak will take hold before it's noticed.

"The risk is that we don't have the level of surveillance that we need. The risk is that there are things basically flying under the radar," said Helen Boucher, an infectious diseases clinician at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and director of the university's Center for Integrated Management of Antimicrobial Resistance.The agency responsible for making that system happen, the HHS, is more than a decade overdue to build a comprehensive biological threat awareness network. Although the agency says it's making taking steps toward meeting that goal, the Government Accountability Office says little progress has been made since Congress first tasked it with the responsibility...

The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act of 2019, which became law in June, gives the HHS until no later than September 2023 to establish networks for public health communications and surveillance and to modernize the public health awareness system. Valerie Melvin, managing director of the information technology and cybersecurity Team at the GAO, who led the last report on the HHS's progress, said the new law might get the effort moving...