The U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) developed a Biological Warfare (BW) Improved Response Program (IRP). The partnership was created to help all agencies with their particular responsibilities in responding to a biological incident. The BW IRP is a multi-year initiative that aims to identify and demonstrate the best practical ways to improve BW domestic preparedness. A multi-agency group that is made up of emergency responders, emergency managers, technical experts, and policy planners from Federal, State, and local agencies from around the country was assembled to execute the program. The BW IRP participants concluded that there was a gap in the handling of communicable diseases. In an effort to close this gap, the SBCCOM and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsored a workshop in April 2000. The goal of the workshop was “to refine the CDC Smallpox Control Plan/Strategy by applying it against a manufactured outbreak scenario. Specific areas to be evaluated were vaccination, quarantine/isolation, and medical surveillance.” SBCCOM and CDC put together a panel of law enforcement and medical/public health personnel, emergency responders, risk communicators, and fire and legal professionals to identify potential solutions to the problem of how to respond to a communicable disease agent. This report was the result of the panel’s discussions and was intended to help CDC and the medical/public health community in resolving the issues that surround the use of a communicable disease in a bioterrorism scenario. The report was divided into three main sections. Section one discussed the process employed to arrive at the conclusions in this report. Section two discussed the focus areas described in the purpose. Section three provided the proposed segments of the decision tree and recommendations on the response template as they relate to communicable disease. 8 appendices.