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Anatomy of a Crisis 3 developing them to be used in support of conventional operations, but the United States and its partners did, for a short while, have the capability to employ a number of biological weapons in support of military operations. Arms control efforts have attempted to eliminate biological weapons as an option of future warfare, but people still think about it. The possibility that substate groups and violent individuals might develop and success- fully disseminate a dangerous biological organism against a civilian popu- lace center is a more recent concern, dramatically escalating in the United States after the 2001 Amerithrax incident.2 Biological threats, whether natural or deliberate, are a subset of public health concerns and national security concerns. This does not mean that there ought to be one singular policy approach to counter all biological threats or one office to oversee all government efforts. It is very impor- tant to understand the context within which we view and address biologi- cal threats and to understand how the government organizes to counter them. Over the past twenty years, there has been an increasing tendency to view public health through the lens of national security, in particular, the concerns over the United States’ preparedness to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from pandemic disease outbreaks and biological terrorism. This has given rise to the term “health security,” and, similar to terms such as “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and “terrorism,” there is no consensus on a universally accepted definition for “health secu- rity.” It can depend based on whether one views health security as a global attempt to minimize the vulnerability of populations living across geo- graphic regions, the discussion of health issues as a foreign policy topic, the protection of specific members of one’s state from specific disease outbreaks, or a collaborative effort to bring in security forces to supple- ment public health agencies.3 While the public health sector has a general interest in addressing biological threats, the U.S. government (and other nations and international organizations) has a concept of health security that also addresses nation-states and individuals using biological threats against its national security interests. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines “biologic threat” as an infectious disease with the potential to spread and cause an outbreak and something that “may spread naturally . . . or be released intentionally.”4 The most likely biological threat is a natural disease that endangers humans, animals, or plants. On the least likely side, there are biological threats deliberately released as a weapon for the purpose of kill- ing people. In between, there are novel emerging diseases, research labo- ratory accidents or negligence, vandalism or sabotage of a laboratory, and deliberate misuse of biological organisms. These are all biological threats but presented in different contexts.5 We have seen an explosion of dif- ferent “bio” terms—biodefense, bioengineering, biotechnology, biosecu- rity, biopreparedness, biosafety, biosurety, bioincidents, bioinformatics,