Chemical Engineering Progress, May 2023
The scientific and policy toolkit must evolve in lockstep with the biological risk landscape. Specifically, the biosurveillance ecosystem needs to layer in solutions that: focus on monitoring trends over time to inform intermediate-term planning and readily identify anomalies, provide early indicators that can help authorities mount timely responses to outbreaks or disruptive events, survey a broad landscape of ongoing and emerging threats, are more cost-effective and less time-consuming than mass testing, can scale rapidly and efficiently during periods of elevated risk or acute transmission. Two sets of tools, in particular, will be critical to building biological radar: genomic surveillance and passive environ-mental monitoring.