Project overview

We developed a framework to categorize biological events based on the event characteristics that drive planning and response decision making. These 12 dimensions include:

• event origin (natural, accidental, or deliberate)
• type (animal, human, or zoonotic disease)
• spread modality (communicable or non-communicable)
• route of transmission (airborne, bloodborne, waterborne, foodborne, or vector-borne)
• diagnostics (point of care, BSL1, BSL2, BSL3, BSL4)
• medical countermeasures (antivirals, antibiotics, vaccine, post-exposure prophylaxis, or none)
• outbreak location (accessible to international community or not and whether conditions are non-permissive due to conflict or other instability)
• affected populations (all, pregnant women, children, elderly, or targeted attack)
• personal protective equipment applicable (respirator, containment suit, or mask/gloves/gown)
• morbidity rate (graded at 5 levels from very low to very high)
• response level (local, intermediate, national, regional, or global)
• policy measures in place (national, international, or none) Using this framework, we generated a series of random combinations to demonstrate the complex range of scenarios possible for biological events. We then removed non-rational combinations, such as excluding targeted attack for a natural outbreak, excluding respirator as required personal protective equipment for foodborne events, and ensuring that vector-borne diseases are only communicable spread modality. After removing implausible combinations, the final set of notional events was approximately 22 million. We selected a subset of 7 major event characteristics and developed this interactive visualization to illustrate the range of possible event combinations.

Finally, we tagged each event with a series of relevant stakeholders based on the origin of the event. Stakeholders in logistics and the public health and medical communities were included for all events. Law enforcement was included as a stakeholder for all accidental and deliberate events. In addition, all intentional events were tagged with security/military stakeholders as were a random subset of natural events (20%), reflecting that these groups respond to some naturally occurring outbreaks as well. Stakeholders in Trade (imports and exports) were included for a subset of all events, but concentrated in the events with primary impacts to animal health (to reflect agricultural trade).

Citation and data use

A peer-reviewed paper describing this project is available here, with the following suggested citation:

Katz R, Graeden E, Kerr J. (2018). The complexity of biological events. The Lancet Global Health. 6-2: 136-137. DOI: 10.1016/S2214-109X(17)30494-1.