National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility
The National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) is a planned United States government-run research facility that will replace the 1950s-era Plum Island Animal Disease Center in New York, which is "nearing the end of its lifecycle and is too small to meet the nation’s research needs." The NBAF will be operated under the authority of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service (USDA-ARS) and Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Veterinary Services (USDA-APHIS-VS) as primary research partners.
The facility will be located in Manhattan, Kansas, and will employ between 250 and 350 people. Construction on the 574,000-square-foot (53,300 m2) facility officially began in May 2015. Although delayed from its original timeline, the facility is now scheduled to be completely constructed and permitted by 2022. Operations will be fully transferred from the Plum Island facility by 2023.
After the Manhattan location was finalized in 2009, the Government Accountability Office questioned the choice of location in a July 2010 draft report, because it is located on the mainland U.S. unlike the current Plum Island facility. This led to a further "site-specific" study of the facility's safety, issued by DHS in 2012.
The NBAF was initially proposed because the current facility on Plum Island was considered inadequate by DHS, as the facility is too small and does not have Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) capabilities.
The new facility will research and develop countermeasures to combat high-consequence biological threats involving human, zoonotic (i.e., transmitted from animals to humans), and foreign animal diseases. Included among the diseases to be studied at the research lab are: foot-and-mouth disease, classical swine fever, African swine fever and contagious bovine pleuropneumonia. Approximately 10% of the facility will be used for BSL-4 level research.
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