Remediation in Review: Major Findings from IBRD

The prospect of cleaning and decontaminating a U.S. city after a wide-area biological attack is a daunting challenge. Ten years after the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, the U.S. is still striving to understand and prepare for biological remediation. As evidenced by the Amerithrax attacks, biological clean-up efforts are inherently time-consuming and costly. Yet, the 2001 remediation response, which involved only a handful of heavily contaminated buildings, would pale in comparison to a wide-area anthrax attack involving thousands of contaminated properties and outdoor spaces.

Faced with this challenge, policymakers and public officials are working to reduce the time and cost of remediation, to limit public health risk, and to minimize long-term economic damage from such an event.

This special feature on biological remediation highlights the recent work and findings of the Interagency Biological Restoration Demonstration program (IBRD), a 4-year program jointly managed and funded by the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) and the Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The program is aimed at reducing the amount of time and resources needed to recover from an intentional wide-area urban release of Bacillus anthracis.

Topics for this special feature include regional and national recovery frameworks, the role of the private sector in decontamination, the behavior of aerosolized B. anthracis, recommended approaches to decontamination for indoor and outdoor spaces, and disposal of anthrax-contaminated waste. This feature is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the work done under IBRD. Instead, it highlights some of IBRD's major accomplishments and findings over the past 4 years of the project. This feature represents the first publication of IBRD materials on remediation planning and response frameworks, and the first time that the public will have ready, open access to the results of IBRD remediation studies.