United States Health Security National Action Plan

The United States Health Security National Action Plan is a national multi-sectoral plan. Its main objective is to strengthen implementation of the International Health Regulations.
In order to increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, the Plan aims for efforts that focus on enhancing detection and reporting of foodborne illness outbreaks and progressively developing additional, state-of-the-art laboratory testing capabilities in state and local public health laboratories; efforts will also focus on expanding capabilities at existing public health laboratories; characterizing and following trends in AMR, including the emergence of new bacterial strains and resistance mechanisms; fostering multisectoral and multidisciplinary collaboration, including through public-private partnerships; and strengthening antimicrobial stewardship activities. Efforts will focus on incorporating the One Health approach to addressing zoonotic diseases nationally and through collaboration across departments and agencies. The first priority is to create a shared vision and roadmap for a more formal approach to One Health. Multiple federal departments and agencies will convene a multisectoral One Health Zoonotic Disease Prioritization workshop to: (a) prioritize the zoonotic diseases of greatest national concern for human, animal, and environmental health sectors that are responsible for federal zoonotic disease programs to address; and (b) develop plans for implementing and strengthening multisectoral approaches to address these diseases in the United States. This work will allow departments and agencies to develop jointly a list of necessary action items and next steps for strengthening One Health approaches to integrate surveillance systems, laboratory systems, joint outbreak response capacity, preparedness planning, and cross-sector prevention and control strategies. The focus will be on implementing two sets of recommendations, one from the Federal Expert Security Advisory Panel (FESAP), which conducted an internal federal government review of biosafety and biosecurity practices, and another from the Fast Track Action Committee on Select Agent Regulations (FTAC-SAR), which conducted an external review that focused on the effects of the select agent regulations on researchers and laboratories. The recommendations made by both the FESAP and FTAC-SAR address the culture of responsibility, oversight, outreach, and education; applied biosafety research; incident reporting; material accountability; inspection processes; regulatory changes; and guidance to improve biosafety and biosecurity. Implementation of the FESAP and FTAC-SAR recommended actions is anticipated to strengthen biosafety and biosecurity practices and oversight activities; efforts will focus on federal government departments and agencies developing additional guidance for preparedness at state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) level, and developing and stockpiling improved medical countermeasures (MCMs) for chemical exposures; expanding the number of laboratories in the Environmental Response Laboratory Network (ERLN); evaluating the variations in SLTT capacities; and developing tools to assist them in reviewing and improving their local capacities to provide a medical response to a large-scale chemical event; increase number of radiation professionals through education, work experience, and increasing awareness of the profession; and collaborating with SLTT health departments/Public Health Emergency Preparedness grant awardees to raise awareness of their potential role in a radiation emergency response, to provide them with guidance on emergency response preparations, and to enhance situational awareness between partners in a radiological response.