The biosecurity busyness paradox: Why doing more and remaining consistent may be undermining global resilience
Justin I McDonald · 2026
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Description
Justin McDonald argues that the world's defenses against pests and diseases suffer from a paradox of busyness. Systems built on containment, control, and rapid response face rising incursions. Bird flu has jumped into dairy cattle and dengue is spreading in Europe, while staff and budgets stay finite. Border interceptions in Australia alone rose by almost half in five years, and modeling suggests even tripling intervention spending would leave residual risk higher.
The problem, he argues, is not effort but design: agencies are so occupied responding that they rarely ask whether they are answering the right problems in the right way. Simply funding the existing model harder will not close the gap between the scale of global threats and the way systems were built to meet them. He calls for rethinking how biosecurity operates, so that consistency and activity stop crowding out resilience.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Justin I McDonald |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 10 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |