Chocolate pirate coins with the same melamine poison that killed infants in China were being sold just over the border at Canadian Costco stores during Halloween this year. They arrived a few months after a Mexican salmonella scourge in US grocery stores. Meanwhile, scientists found that migratory ducks are bringing Asian forms of low pathogenic avian flu to Alaska.

From a small command center tucked into the Nebraska Avenue complex of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), seemingly disparate events like these are absorbed into an organism of Internet and inter-party networks, along with reams of open source data and news from across the globe. From classified federal intelligence, to extraordinary patterns in emergency room visits in a particular state or county, all of it feeds the new National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC), the latest in post-Sept. 11, 2001, fusion and what Director Eric Myers hopes will someday be a triumph of man over information.

“As a highly functioning entity, it will cast an ever-widening network of health surveillance, capture and analyze significant events more quickly and provide timely alerts and cueing to a wider range of decision makers, thus significantly improving the security of our nation,” Myers told HSToday in an interview.

In command

A retired US Navy captain, Myers has been on board with the information analysis and intelligence side of homeland security since the inception of DHS in 2003. He was in charge of the National Biosurveillance Integration System (NBIS) since 2006, but became the first director of the NBIC when it was established by Congress through public law in 2007.

NBIC came into full compliance in late September 2008, with “about 30 souls” serving as analysts and tech experts and “watch officers” who represent the NBIC 24 hours a day at the National Operations Center (NOC). Myers’ job isn’t easy: he must build and maintain a seamless, centralized network that will not only pull in information as fast as it can get it from federal, state and local partners but digest, customize and re-distribute it in real time. It’s all about warning, tracking and preventing both man-made and naturally occurring biological threats.

“[NBIC] is charged with the primary mission to rapidly identify, characterize, localize and track a biological event of national concern; integrate and analyze data relating to human health, animal, plant, food, water; and disseminate alerts and pertinent information,” Myers said in a joint statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security in July 2008.

In other words, he told HSToday, if a different strain of avian influenza (H5-N1) has moved from birds to a local human population, or an elevated level of a pathogen like smallpox or anthrax is detected through one of the BioWatch filters in a major city, or a strange level of bacteria or germ is found in the water supply, the information will get to NBIC in time to make a difference.

The very moment that “Cain is sneaking up behind Abel with a stick,” said Myers, NBIC will know. Ultimately, Myers hopes, NBIC will have a sense the instant that an biological event begins to occur, will be able to scientifically examine it, will analyze how it will impact different areas of the country and be able to issue warnings down to state and local fusion centers.

The challenge

In order to actualize this ambitious vision, NBIC has to meet three high goal posts: getting all pertinent federal agencies on board, building the right technology to gather, digest and disseminate the information and streamlining the flow to state and local partners. It is not there, yet.

So far, NBIC has signed memoranda of understanding with seven out of 12 of its targeted federal partners, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services. But as of November, it had yet to get the same formalized agreements from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—though in the case of the latter, Myers said they were working on a relationship “with particular vigor.”

“The challenge is to get everyone participating,” said Myers, “and that’s mainly because of cultural differences,” in terms of agencies getting accustomed to talking to one another, exchanging timely classified and non-classified information and recognizing the benefits of mutual exchange.

Secondly, to truly work, NBIC must have the right information technology to automate the intake and output of massive amounts of data and analyses and to tailor this information to ensure partners won’t be inundated with annoying redundancies and material they can’t use.

This takes on some particular importance when considering that NBIC is supposed to be accessing “over 530 information feeds,” including 35 foreign government sites, federal partners, 85 local, state or territorial health and agriculture sites and 20 organizational sites—which would invariably include the World Heath Organization, the World Organization for Animal Health and the ARGUS Project at Georgetown University, which tracks biological events on an international front. And that’s just the open source information, according to Myers and DHS representatives.

In July, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) raised the question whether NBIC was technologically up to the task.

“In addition, a contractor DHS hired to enhance NBIC’s IT system delivered an upgrade to the system on April 1, 2008; however, NBIC officials stated that they need to complete additional work before granting other agencies full access to the new system. For example, NBIC is still in the process of training employees to use the system and negotiating agreements on the data that agencies will provide to NBIS,” stated the GAO report, Biosurveillance: Preliminary Observations on the Department of Homeland Security’s Biosurveillance Initiatives.

Far to go

Myers admits the technology has far to go before NBIC is performing to specification. Right now, NBIC analysts manually feed information into the Biosurveillance Common Operating Picture (BCOP), a standard interface that utilizes a series of maps. Users—including all federal partners—can now click through icons on the maps to access current information. Reports and alerts are broadcast to state and local agencies when necessary.

“The BCOP exists at a rudimentary level,” said Myers, though it was online and providing real time information to interested parties during the salmonella outbreak last June. Right now, Myers added, NBIC is doing the “testing and evaluation” necessary to move BCOP towards full automation—meaning that information will flow in and out to NBIC’s partners in the form of up-to-the-minute, customized data and sophisticated analysis, not just as “the day’s events,” alerts or “old-fashioned” reports.

Analysts now employed at NBIC have scientific backgrounds and will be an integral part of making that happen, said Myers. “Where we want to take it is to rapidly network and bring the right brains to the right data—massive amounts of data,” he said, so that the program will “do the comparisons easily and readily and in a way that anyone could capture—the guy on a rescue and recovery truck, or a state health center or the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”

The third prong of the challenge is streamlining the flow to recipients outside of Washington. Currently, NBIC information goes out to state public health entities and the CDC, which in turn provide and receive alerts from developing state and regional fusion centers. Myers hopes that in the future NBIC will work directly with the fusion centers, which, by virtue of their nature, will ensure that no one is left out of the loop.

“From the state standpoint, there are ongoing discussions on how to work with the (NBIC) program,” said Mary DiOrio, the assistant state epidemiologist at the Ohio State Department of Health. Currently, biosurveillance at the state level is a coordinated effort between the state’s fusion center, the CDC, the Ohio Department of Homeland Security and the state public health department.

But there is always a need, said Brian Fowler, director of early event surveillance at the Ohio state health department, to get at “patterns across states.”

“It goes back to the concept that I may know something is happening from my emergency data, and there may be something that someone else has that I need to know, but I don’t know it—those two pieces of information together could be very useful,” he noted. “Someone needs to be looking at the big picture.”

Jena Baker McNeill, a homeland security analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said DHS should be credited for pursuing biosurveillance, but acknowledges the gap, so far, between the vision and reality.

“In some ways, they have made considerable progress, but they still need to look at how to integrate state and local sources,” said McNeill. “They have to figure out how to have a common language among all the agencies that are tasked with homeland security. They have some work to do, but I don’t think they’ve gotten much kudos for what they have done so far.” HST