The Contributions of Biomedical Informatics to the Fight Against Bioterrorism

Abstract

Current outbreaks of anthrax exposure and cases test our health care delivery and public health systems with threats of large spatial scope -the entire nation-that demand a very short temporal latency in our responses. Other potential bioterrorist attacks only increase the dimensions of this unprecedented challenge. The dimensions, however, are not unprecedented; rather, they are quite familiar to many researchers in biomedical informatics over the last 40 years. The task of comprehensive real-time monitoring on the regional and national scale has been the subject of full-fledged design and large-scale implementations led by biomedical informaticians.