Eileen R. Choffnes

Choffnes is director of the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats. Her expertise is in microbial threats. She was the study director for the recent National Academies report, "Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences." The responsibility for the content of this article rests with the author and does not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Medicine or its committees.

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Articles by Eileen R. Choffnes

Opinion
16 April 2008
Biosecurity

Improving infectious disease surveillance

Eileen R. Choffnes

The advance of human civilization has brought people, plants, animals, and microbes together in otherwise improbable combinations and locations. Today, international travel and commerce (most notably the explosive growth of commercial air transportation during the past 50 years) drives the rapid, global distribution of microbial pathogens, and the organisms that harbor them. These include humans, whose migrations have been implicated in the spread of diseases including SARS, drug-resistant malaria, and chikungunya (a vector-borne viral disease) in Europe.

1 September 2006
Feature

A Brave New World in the Life Sciences

Eileen R. ChoffnesStanley M. LemonDavid A. Relman
The breadth of biological threats is much broader than commonly thought and will continue to expand.