WRAIR-AFRIMS protects force health at Super Garuda Shield 2026

The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research – Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences, in partnership with the Australian Defence Force Malaria and Infectious Diseases Institute, conducted real-time infectious disease surveillance in support of Super Garuda Shield 2026.

Super Garuda Shield is an annual military exercise involving military personnel from the Indonesian National Armed Forces, the United States Armed Forces, and 13 partner countries. The exercise is designed to improve the interoperability and readiness of the allied nations and strengthen the partnerships through shared learning and training.

WRAIR-AFRIMS supported the exercise with disease surveillance at the Baturaja Combat Training Center. By analyzing human, environment, and insect samples, the biosurveillance team monitored for signs of diarrhea, respiratory, and other tropical disease pathogens.

“In military exercises in tropical regions, there’s a higher risk of acute diarrhea, malaria, dengue, and other disease threats” said Maj. Sidhartha Chaudhury, officer-in-charge of the WRAIR-AFRIMS biosurveillance team. “During this exercise, norovirus emerged as a threat. But because the team detected it early, measures could be taken to prevent the spread of the disease.”

In addition to the measures employed by WRAIR-AFRIMS in the past, two new disease surveillance technologies were fielded this year at Super Garuda Shield: microbial air sampling and metagenomic sequencing. Microbial air sampling detects airborne pathogens in indoor and outdoor environments in order to provide an early warning of infectious disease threats before people get infected. Metagenomic sequencing, using a gene amplification method developed by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, is a technique that reads and analyzes all the genetic material in a sample to identify new or emerging pathogens not detectable using traditional approaches.

“This is the first time we were able to take these new methods into the field and demonstrate that they work,” said Maj. Timothy Egbo, a microbiologist assigned to the Australian Defence Force Malaria and Infectious Diseases Institute. “Not only did it show that these technologies have real-world applications but also that they can be used to detect pathogens in austere or operational environments without outside laboratory support.”

Learn more about WRAIR-AFRIMS, including its disease surveillance and other capabilities, visit the website at https://afrims.health.mil/

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