“A Biodefense Fusion Center to Improve Disease Surveillance and Early Warnings to Enhance National Security,” is the title of a paper by Michael Baker, Jacob Baker, Deon Canyon, and Sebastian Kevany, for Security Nexus. This paper discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the need to establish a BioDefense Fusion Center to enhance coordination and to protect national security.

Exerpt
Infectious diseases continue to evolve and disrupt nations around the globe at a faster pace. This process is exacerbated by demographic, political, and climate change pressures on populations that push humanity into habitats that were once wilderness or were considered unfit for living. Thus, our potential exposure to novel agents remains on the rise in line with population growth. The next pandemic may yet strike while we remain exposed due to rapid, unsustainable urbanization, climate change, destructive food harvesting and producing practices, globalization, and reliance on other nations for essential items.

Drs. Canyon and Kevany are professors at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies (DKI APCSS) in Honolulu, USA. The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the DKI APCSS or the United States Government.

Security Nexus is a peer-reviewed, online journal published by the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.

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