DHS Wants to Stop the Next Anthrax Outbreak with Open Data

Nextgov: If someone unleashed a harmful pathogen in a crowded metropolitan subway system, local and national first responders would have just minutes to quash it before it proliferated.

But today’s biothreat surveillance systems might take too long and too often rely on medical data that belongs to health systems and patients, according to the Homeland Security Department.

That’s why DHS is launching a new challenge competition encouraging developers to come up with new ways to detect biothreats—potentially chemicals like anthrax, used for bioterrorism, as well as naturally occurring, often contagious diseases like smallpox.

Read article