ELBE

Context

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been an increase in the escalation of national and international security concerns regarding specific biological hazards. After SARS (2003) and MERS (2012), the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), it has once again been shown that the growing encroachment of humans into animal habitats, promotes the outbreak of zoonoses, while globalized economic cycles and societies become more and more vulnerable to disruptive effects. The HUS-EHEC epidemic a few years earlier (2011) also demonstrated the complex task of researching the causes and damage control of food-associated outbreak events in the context of industrial production and fragmented supply chains.

Despite this understanding, biological hazard sites will (initially) be much more common as local events. This applies equally to accidental events, such as the import of infectious diseases via ship and air freight, as well as to actual or suspected scenarios of terrorist attacks.

After the German authorities were primarily concerned with the so-called "powder letters" in the area of bio-terrorism following the "Amerithrax" attacks (2001),  the thwarted ricin attack of Cologne-Chorweiler (2018) as well as the allegedly planned ricin or cyanide attack in Castrop-Rauxel (2023) highlight on the other hand the dangers of intentionally caused events of a criminal or terrorist nature. Their likelihood also increases in light of the availability of relevant knowledge and its spreading by terrorist actors, as well as the widespread availability of new technologies, such as the CRISPR/Cas "gene scissors".

At the same time, the assassination attempts on Kim Jong-Nam with VX in Malaysia (2017) and Sergej Skripal with a substance of the Novicho- group in the United Kingdom (2018) illustrate that even state actors in a hybrid threat environment do not shy away from the extraterritorial use of CBR- substances for state terrorist purposes. Given the geopolitical security situation, it must be assumed that the use of military-grade B-agents by (semi-)state actors cannot be ruled out in Germany either. Even (allegedly) "natural" or accidental scrapes can spark speculations about an intentional origin or be actually used to cover up a deliberately fabricated one.

Measures

The detection, containment, management, and investigation of special biological hazard events requires cross-sector and cross-level cooperation among various governmental actors from the public health service and the emergency response, some of which are not in contact with each other in their daily business. They differ not only in terms of tasks, authorization and competency profiles, but also have different organizational and leadership cultures, decision-making processes, problem perception, and crisis resilience. The resulting complex inter- and intra-organizational leadership and decision-making structures can have negative effects on managing operations in a crisis situation, for example through conflicting goals, diffusion of responsibility, and inadequate information management. In particular, the lack of coordination in biological situations has been critically reflected repeatedly by the professional public in the past and sometimes been labeled as "authority failure" in media reporting.

The goal of the project is to develop and improve procedural and organizational standards for interagency cooperation in critical, biological hazard events, particularly between actors of the public health sector and emergency response authorities.

The natural, accidental or intentional release of highly contagious pathogens constitutes an extraordinary biosafety incident. For official actors, this can result in highly complex and dynamic deployment situations of long duration in an uncertain information environment. In addition to the traditional "emergency response organizations," the public health service plays a vital role in identifying and managing risks in such situations. Both such horizontal coordination and cooperation across different administrative levels have repeatedly proven problematic in the past. During the compilation of the project consortium, all official actors pointed out the skills gap in the field of biohazards. This is due to the needs in the capabilities of the involved authorities, which are currently being increasingly upgraded (state laboratories, B-component of the Analytical Task Force for Northern Germany, etc.), but also due to the requirement to improve the interaction of official actors with their respective specific legal mandate in crisis management.

The project will be the first in Germany to develop generic process and organizational standards that will enable structured collaboration among all participating authorities in the event of biological hazards, thereby contributing to effective government crisis management in biological hazard situations. The development of these standards takes place within the framework of a scientifically supported, multi-stage exercise series with increasing complexity. End-users of the developed conceptual solutions are therefore not only the actors directly involved in the exercise series, but potentially all regional authorities in Germany due to the generic nature of the recommendations.

Special biological situations involve a wide range of authorities but also possibly municipal enterprises, such as waterworks, etc. The ELBE project brings these actors together at all levels from local (district health office) to federal authorities (BBK, RKI, THW) in exercise scenarios, thereby aiming at improving communication and mutual understanding between institutions.  The ELBE project involves state and local authorities of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg; conceptually and operationally active federal authorities are involved as associated partners with partly active roles to make the results transferable to other federal states.