DoD Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System -- Partnering in the Fight Against Emerging Infections, Fiscal Year 2006

摘要

The Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (DoD-GEIS) was created in 1996 by Presidential Decision Directive NSTC-7, which expanded the role of the DoD to address threats to the United States and other nations posed by emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. In an external review of GEIS five years later in 2001, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences described GEIS as a critical and unique resource of the United States in the context of global affairs. It is the only U.S. entity that is devoted to infectious diseases globally and that has broad-based laboratory capacities in overseas settings. A National Intelligence Estimate at that time noted that emerging infectious diseases are a global security issue because they have the capacity to harm US interests abroad through destabilizing key institutions, obstructing trade and human migration, slowing or reversing economic growth, fomenting social unrest, and complicating US response to refugee situations by increasing the demand for humanitarian intervention and through their association with biological terrorism and warfare. The validity of this estimate was supported by the swift appearance of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003 and highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2005.