United States biological defense program

The United States biological defense program — in recent years also called the National Biodefense Strategy — began as a small defensive effort that paralleled the country's offensive biological weapons development and production program, active between 1943 and 1969. Organizationally, the medical defense research effort was pursued first (1956-1969) by the U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU) and later, after the discontinuation of the offensive program, by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Both of these units were located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories were headquartered. The current mission is multi-agency, not exclusively military, and is purely to develop defensive measures against bio-agents, as opposed to the former bio-weapons development program.

In 1951, due to biological warfare concerns arising from the Korean War, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a hands-on two-year postgraduate training program in epidemiology, with a focus on field work.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, and the consequent expansion of federal bio-defense expenditures, USAMRIID has been joined at Fort Detrick by sister bio-defense agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (NIAID’s Integrated Research Facility) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center and the National Bioforensic Analysis Center). These—along with the much older Foreign Disease Weed Science Research Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture—now constitute the National Interagency Confederation for Biological Research (NICBR).

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