The new Biodefense Knowledge Center, part of the Department of Homeland Security, will gather and weigh information on how dire a particular threat really is.

By combining real-time intelligence from other agencies with scientific research on specific pathogens, the center researchers will craft risk assessments -- pictures of how different, weaponized agents most likely would be delivered.

They will gauge the difficulty and expense of creating such weapons and their impact on a civilian population with mixed ages and vulnerabilities.

People have lists of agents they are most concerned about, said Maureen McCarthy, director of the Office of Research and Development in DHS's Science and Technology division.

Those lists, we can tell you, were based on what we understood during the Cold War. Those lists do not reflect, at a detailed level, what we think terrorists with a different set of motivations and a different set of capabilities could be able to do against a civil population.

The risk assessments will support many agencies and activities, including buying vaccines and treatments to be stockpiled under the Bioshield program.

What DHS and the Knowledge Center are going to provide is an assessment of what the worst-case probable scenario is -- what are the technically and operationally feasible attacks and, ultimately, how many people would be exposed, given that scenario, Bill Colston, the center's director, told United Press International.

Health and Human Services takes that and they line that up with their epidemiological models to determine how many people would actually be exposed and how hospitals would be impacted, how many vaccines would be needed and all the rest of the stuff they need to form their procurement.

Colston said his staff will assess each possible bioterror agent this way.

I think (the DHS task) is crucial, said a congressional aide who follows homeland defense. (The National Institutes of Health) has $1.7 billion in terms of research and HHS has $5.6 billion in terms of procurement and we don't want to see that money wasted on dumb things.

Their job is to think about those kinds of scary scenarios and to actually to do some sort of scientific study to see if we are supposed to be worried about that or not, the aide told UPI.

The center, dedicated Friday at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., also will act as a fast-reaction research source for DHS and other agencies.

They will create lists of experts available 24 hours a day, every day and will sort through the latest research to compile a library of the most recent information on bioterror agents, medications and vulnerabilities. The BKC will keep track of stockpiles of vaccines and collect the genome sequences of pathogens of concern.

One of the major goals of the Knowledge Center is to actually integrate, ultimately, everything we know about biodefense, Colston said.

Three other national laboratories -- Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Sandia -- will support the Knowledge Center. Together they bring expertise in computer modeling, simulation, visualization and automated-text extraction that will help the center find information and apply it in user-friendly ways.

BKC and the other national labs also will be key players in monitoring for threats across the nation. They have detection expertise and were the source of the current BioWatch program, McCarthy said.

BioWatch uses thousands of pollutant monitors in numerous cities nationwide to sniff the air for bioterrorism agents, with the goal of giving officials as much time as possible to react.

Eventually, the analysis and modeling mission of the Knowledge Center may expand to include chemical and other weapons, Colston said.

Center collaborators also include three DHS University Centers of Excellence -- at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Texas A&M University in College Station.

The Minnesota and Texas centers focus on protecting the nation's food supply and farm animals, respectively, while the University of Southern California houses a center for the economic analysis of terrorism events.

The BKC, the three other national labs and the three universities are all part of a group of organizations called the Homeland Security Biodefense Complex.

The complex is centered at Fort Deterick in Frederick, Md. DHS is planning to build a new $128 million facility there to house a biosecurity forensic lab and a Biological Threat Characterization Center. The Knowledge Center and the BTCC will work together to stay ahead of emerging risks, McCarthy said.

The biggest challenge for us is not responding to something that happened two years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, McCarthy told UPI, "it is understanding what potentially may happen 20 years from now and building the appropriate countermeasures to protect against it.

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