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Biosecurity refers to any guarantee that persons maintain their personal health, habitable shelter and productive local agriculture even under active threat of biological warfare or epidemic disease. Nation-state militaries attempt to assure this by biodefense measures, and more sustainably by safe trade rules for biosafety, e.g. the Biosafety Protocol. These minimize exposure to alien organisms via trade or warfare.

However, any biosafety regime has flaws, loopholes, vulnerabilities, and incentives to subvert it - and biological warfare actually intends doing personal harm. Military or civil defense measures are always inadequate to protect a trade and tariff system that encourages the propagation of risks to human bodies and natural ecologies: biodefense is a stopgap measure. More profound long-term change to institutions is required:

What really distinguishes biosecurity from food security, health security, biosafety or emergency response systems (fire, paramedics) that guarantee other forms of human security is the long-term focus on insulating all organisms (not just humans) from the active threat of infection or parasitic competition, and the assumption that "what can go wrong will go wrong", i.e. once threats enter ecoregions they are assumed to be risks to everyone, not just the few people who were present and perhaps saved recently.

Local short-term measures to allay direct biological warfare harms or detect it in advance of attacks, usually called biodefense, are a small part of biosecurity. Military or other emergency responses can only be marshalled in a small area over a short time, whereas dangerous molecules, small organisms (or even potentially microscopic machines or robots) in the living ecology can be dormant for unlimited lengths of time and then strike. Active ecological warfare bypasses all biodefense, and is an ancient and common technique of warfare, e.g. "scorched Earth", "poisoning wells".

Biosecurity can be assured and insured (but not *en*sured) by a robust biohazard response protocol that includes medical care and health security. Various means of biosecurity audit test perimeters (around storage, transport) for effectiveness under threat and temptation, and are usually required to maintain insurance coverage, government licenses, and trade access to ecoregions concerned about new infections.

One proposal to align biosecurity needs with public policy is Ecoregional Democracy - which re-patterns zones of inspection and enforcement around natural borders. This would extend existing measures to ensure agricultural regions are not infected by organisms from other ecoregions, e.g. along main highways in California. Under such schemes, North American biosecurity measures might be stronger along the Continental Divide and weaker along the US-Canada or US-Mexico borders (across which air, water, genes and bacteria flow without limit as part of natural ecology). Ecologists, urbanists or a Green Party may stress other benefits of such moves to secure urban centres or natural ecoregions - including taxation and tariff schemes actually aligned to environment risks.

Other preventative measures are unlikely to be effective or acceptable to the general population in peacetime. There could be general vaccination against biowarfare agents but the public is unlikely to accept potentially harmful vaccines for such agents, which tend to be extinct or very rare in the wild. States do not currently routinely vaccinate against likely biowarfare agents - given that threats have generally not materialized as real risks.

Gathering intelligence could theoretically prevent at least some attacks. However, in the case of an agent like smallpox, ebola or plague, an attack could consist of a single individual with no apparent symptoms simply entering the country and walking around in population centers. If a large weak population (e.g. of elderly or homeless people who do not regularly seek medical attention for ailments) becomes infected, entire cities could be devastated, perhaps permanently.

However, intelligent threats can never be reliably contained by preventions; Countermeasures include random sampling of weak populations; monitoring statistics for patterns which suggest emerging epidemics; ensuring sufficient stockpiles of the appropriate vaccines or other medicines required to contain an outbreak; public health education and alertness; widespread use of sophisticated pathogen detectors. These are prerequisites to any effective system of biohazard response and "end of pipe" ecological cleanup.

A single global biohazard response protocol and biosecurity protocol building on biosafety protocol, safe trade, and various treaty measures to limit proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, has been proposed as part of United Nations peacekeeping mandate. This has been rejected by "rogue nations" and biotechnology corporations wishing to keep secrets from each other. So biosecurity remains an "end of pipe dream". It seems possible to ensure only with fundamental changes in mind-set and deep implementation of goals of the ecology movement and peace movement - lack of it may threaten fundamental institutions of democracy, e.g. when a 2001 anthrax attack emptied the U.S. Capitol.

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