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"These initiatives build on a growing perception among diverse actors — life scientists and public health officials, policymakers and security analysts — that new biological threats challenge existing ways of understanding and managing collective health and security. From the vantage point of such actors, the global scale of these threats crosses and confounds the boundaries of existing regulatory jurisdictions. Moreover, their pathogenicity and mutability pushes the limits of current technical capacities to detect and treat disease."

"However, the ideal of dual use faces many difficulties, in part because public health professionals often do not agree with security experts about which problems deserve attention, and how interventions should be implemented. Such disagreements point to broader tensions provoked by the current intersection of public health and national security. Public health officials and national security experts promoting preparedness strategies have very different ways of evaluating threats and responses. As a result, programs that depend on coordination between these groups may often founder."

"The report defines emerging disease as one among a number of new threats to security that 'do not stem from the actions of clearly defined individual states but from diffuse issues that transcend sovereign borders and bear directly on the effects of increasing globalization that challenge extant frameworks for thinking about national and international security.' Proposed responses to this new 'global threat' have come from various kinds of organizations, with diverse agendas."