Department of Homeland Security Bioterrorism Risk Assessment: A Call for Change (BMSA)

Released 09.26.08

In 2004, the President issued a homeland security directive that, along with the National Strategy for Homeland Security published in 2002, mandated assessments of the biological weapons threat to the nation and assigned responsibility for those assessments to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The first such assessment—the Biological Threat Risk Assessment (BTRA) of 2006—is a computer-based tool to assess the risk associated with the release of each of 28 biological threat agents. To assist in its preparation of this version of BTRA as well as the 2008 version, DHS asked the NRC to carry out a study of the methodology used by the agency to prepare BTRA of 2006.  This NRC report presents an introduction to the challenge; an analysis of the critical contribution of risk analysis to risk management; a description of the method used to produce the BTRA of 2006, which is the foundation for later assessments; a discussion of risk assessment for unknown and engineered bio-threats; and ways to improve bioterrorism consequence assessment and the BTRA methodology. 

Report Summary (PDF)