By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
FORT DETRICK, Md., Oct. 10, 2012 – From a windowless building
behind barriers and fences here, scientists, physicians and other
experts monitor a range of intelligence and open-source channels for
threats to the health of U.S. forces and the homeland.
But the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical
Intelligence, known as NCMI, is an intelligence organization, not a
public health organization.
The job, NCMI Director Air Force Col.
(Dr.) Anthony M. Rizzo told American Forces Press Service, is not to
tell the public what is happening. “It is our responsibility to tell
policymakers and planners … what we believe is going to happen,” he
explained.
The center’s intelligence targets are medical and
scientific issues. Its products, like those of the rest of the
intelligence community, are predictive analysis and products for
warning, produced in four divisions whose experts follow developments in
infectious disease, environmental health, global health systems and
medical science and
technology.
NCMI is the primary source of
medical intelligence in the federal government, Rizzo said, “so as a
consequence, we have to write for all levels, all customers, … from the
president down to the most tactical intelligence officer or surgeon in
the field.”
In the hallways and offices of the nondescript NCMI
building are a broad range of scientists, many with multiple advanced
academic degrees, many of them leaders in their fields.
“We take these very smart people,” Rizzo said, “and turn them into intelligence officers.”
Downstairs is a typical operations center -- multiple desks and
computer monitors face large, wall-mounted screens that carry news
reports from around the world.
Also at work in the building are scientists from many partner organizations.
“We are an all-source organization, and thus we have to use every means
available to get our data. And the intelligence community partners who
provide national technical means are physically located here,” the
director said.
“But we also have responsibility for intelligence
for homeland health protection,” he added, “[and] we could not do that
job without a large number of non-intelligence-community partners who
are also resident here -- fully cleared and full-up members of the
organization.”
Resident partners include organizations like the
National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Agriculture Department.
And Rizzo said he has NCMI experts embedded at other intelligence
agencies.
Each NCMI division needs a certain amount of baseline data to do its job, the director explained.
“In the Infectious Disease Division, the baseline requirement is to
understand the risk of every type of [endemic] infectious disease in
every country. You can imagine why,” Rizzo said.
“If an outbreak
of mystery disease occurs in a country, we need to be able to say that
we know in that country that Ebola, malaria and dengue are very common,
so my people can look at the symptoms of mystery disease and know” the
most likely suspects, Rizzo said.
“If mystery disease doesn’t fit the things that are most likely,” he added, “then we have to start looking really differently.”
At NCMI, every division also has a baseline product in addition to
alerts and threat forecasts. In the Infectious Disease Division, it’s
the Infectious Disease Risk Assessment, a predictive product, Rizzo
noted, “that says if you go to a place unprotected, we predict these are
the diseases your people will get, and … these are the numbers of
cases.”
Every federal organization that sends Americans overseas
uses this product, along with baseline products from the other
divisions.
Also at NCMI is a cross-divisional pandemic warning
team that spends all its time monitoring highly pathogenic H5N1 avian
influenza and other potential pandemic diseases.
In April 2009,
two months before the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention officially declared the global outbreak
of H1N1 influenza a pandemic, NCMI published an intelligence product for
senior U.S. policymakers that predicted H1N1 would be a pandemic.
“That does not make us better than [CDC],” Rizzo said, “What it does do
is make us different, because [CDC] has to be right. We in the
intelligence community love to be right, but we also know that in order
to provide timely warning, warning in time for the customer to take
action to mitigate what we’ve predicted, we have to be early. And the
earlier we predict, … the less certainty we have.”
At NCMI, the
Environmental Health Division monitors toxic industrial chemicals,
materials and facilities worldwide. Its baseline product is the
Environmental Health Risk Assessment, which addresses the quality of
air, food, soil, water and risk from chemical exposure worldwide. The
division also does what Rizzo calls predictive hazard area modeling.
“We can tell you with 99 percent accuracy,” the director said, “if this
thing that’s full of chemicals leaks next Thursday, here’s where the
hazard area is, here’s where you should not be standing, and here’s
where it’s OK to stand.”
The division monitors several facilities
around the clock and can forecast dispersion events at those places
immediately, but it also can do similar forecasts for any chemical or
nuclear facility on the planet, Rizzo said.
Every day of the
year, the director said, “there is a biological or chemical event
somewhere in the world, sometimes many of them. And we own the
responsibility of assessing whether or not those events … are manmade or
naturally occurring, and then making predictions about them.”
The Global Health Systems Division is responsible for understanding the
medical capabilities of every country in the world, and it monitors the
quality of every nation’s blood supply. The division’s baseline product
is the Medical Capabilities Assessment for each country, and it is
responsible for maintaining Defense Department databases that
characterize overseas medical facilities, including hospitals, clinics,
labs, blood banks and pharmaceutical production facilities.
“If
you’re a planner,” the director said, “and I don’t care who you’re a
planner for, you’re using that Infectious Disease Risk Assessment,
you’re using that Medical Capabilities Assessment, you’re using the
Environmental Health Assessment to decide, ‘What do I use to protect my
people? What do I have to bring? What can I leave home?’”
The
NCMI Science and Technology Division is responsible for understanding
every nation’s medical defense capabilities against chemical,
biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.
“If you understand a
country’s medical defense capabilities, that can very much help you
understand what their other capabilities might be and what their intent
is,” Rizzo said. “People plan medical defense based on what they think
is going to happen to them or what they think they can do.”
Along
with the baseline products that come out of each NCMI division, all
produce warnings, alerts and special products during crises.
“When it comes to a crisis such as the earthquake in Haiti or an
invasion of a country or a NATO bombing campaign against a country, … we
have to tailor products to support the U.S. government and the
governments of our allies,” Rizzo said. “So while we are writing all the
time, we’re also very responsive to world events. When the earthquake
in Haiti occurred, we put out close to 100 products.”
Most
products start out in a classified version, but the director said his
people are very good at writing products to be shared with NCMI’s
non-intelligence community partners.
“We don’t get credit,” Rizzo added, “but that doesn’t matter.”
NCMI itself is an important partner in the multiagency effort to
implement the nation’s first U.S. National Strategy for Biosurveillance,
released this summer by the White House to make sure that agencies can
quickly detect a range of global health and security hazards.
“When we think of the word biosurveillance, we think of the kinds of
things that the public health community does -- collecting cases, taking
cultures, deciding which disease is which,” Rizzo said. “But we in the
intelligence community are looking way before that to determine [if
there are] threats on the horizon.”
When the experts at NCMI
communicate a threat to the public health community, the director added,
“they can focus … their public health efforts, and so we are very much
involved in biosurveillance, but … at the front end of the process.”
The whole world deals with limited resources, Rizzo added, and CDC, the
World Health Organization and other public health organizations can’t
look at everything all the time.
“But if we in the intelligence
community, especially we in medical intelligence, are able to say,
‘Here’s a threat on the horizon that we perceive,’ … then it’s up to our
customer to decide whether or not they will think about it,” the
director added.
“We have very good, nonadversarial, very
supportive relationships with our partners,” Rizzo said, “and typically
if we say we’re concerned, they respond.”
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