Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office (PHSIPO)

Biosurveillance Coordination Activity

Coordinating Biosurveillance Efforts for CDC

Activity Overview

In today's modern world of high-density population centers and global mass transit, events such as emerging disease outbreaks, environmental exposures, and natural or manmade disasters can have a sudden and significant effect on human health. CDC's Biosurveillance Coordination Activity (BCA) creates strategies, initiatives, and actions to improve U.S. response to these threats and hazards. BCA's work helps to address these potential threats by coordinating biosurveillance efforts across multiple entities in the international, federal, state, local, and private sectors.

This coordination allows CDC to

• use its experience and expertise in national public health surveillance to develop and shape national biosurveillance policy;
• maximize its professional and scientific relationships with stakeholders; and
• develop an action plan to enhance the nation's biosurveillance enterprise.

Through these activities, BCA helps to improve the nation's ability to determine, track, and understand the number and nature of existing surveillance systems and programs so that they may be integrated into a national biosurveillance enterprise.

BCA also helps to develop national biosurveillance policy and achieve mandates outlined in legislation by integrating biosurveillance into other areas of response, such as public health situational awareness called for in the Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act and the National Health Security Strategy.

Activity Mission

The mission of BCA is to lead efforts, under delegated authorities of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21: Public Health and Medical Preparedness, to "…establish an operational national epidemiologic surveillance system for human health…."

Download the Latest BCA Overview