A Special Feature in Health Security: Approaches to Assessing and Managing Health Security Risks

Topic Editor: Crystal Watson, DrPH, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Baltimore, Maryland

The field of health security has responsibility for addressing a wide range of threats and hazards, including those that are natural, accidental, and intentional in nature; of human, animal, and plant origin; and related to chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear agents, or natural hazards like hurricanes and floods. Assessing the risks associated with this wide variety of threats and hazards can be complex and can be accomplished using a range of methodologies.

Risk assessment is a useful and necessary step toward determining priorities for the health security community. Similarly, management of identified health security risks can take a variety of forms, using different methodologies and organizational approaches. Once risks have been assessed, managing those risks can be systematized through deliberate approaches to identifying priorities and values for response and options for action, deciding on the best options, implementing interventions, and evaluating management efforts. Successful management of health security risks can have significant impacts on our collective health and security, as well as economic and social stability, and is an important component of health security practice.

A special feature in Health Security will be devoted to analysis of methods, programs, policies, and systems, as well as ongoing and future research and policy efforts, that focus on risk assessment and systematic management of health security risks of all types. The journal seeks scholarly papers that address the wide range of policy, practice, and research issues relevant to this topic. Additionally, narrative or conceptual reviews of specific risk assessment and management approaches are welcome.

Topics might include:

• Highlighting specific risk assessment methodologies
• Review of risk assessments for different types of hazards related to health security
• Proposals for how to compare risks between types of threats and hazards
• Novel uses for risk assessment in support of prevention, preparedness, and response activities
• Highlighting specific risk management approaches
• Comparing management approaches for different scenarios
• Proposals for new research in risk assessment and management
• Proposals for new policies at the local, national, or international level around risk assessment and management
• Program reviews or descriptions of how risk assessment and management are being used in the field

Articles on other aspects of risk assessment and management are also welcome.

Health Security, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers, is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed journal, now in its 17th year of publication. It serves as an international forum for debate and exploration of the key strategic, scientific, and operational issues posed by biological weapons, pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to global health. The journal provides multidisciplinary analyses and perspectives essential to the creation of strategies and programs that can diminish the consequences of health emergencies, epidemics, and disasters.

The journal’s international audience includes those professional communities that have strategic, scientific, or operational responsibilities critical to improving health security, including medicine, public health, law, national security, bioscientific research, agriculture, food safety, and drug and vaccine development.

Health Security is indexed in MEDLINE; PubMed; PubMed Central; Current Contents®/Social & Behavioral Sciences; Social Sciences Citation Index®; Social SciSearch®; Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition; EMBASE/Excerpta Medica; EMBiology; Scopus; ProQuest; CAB Abstracts; and Global Health.

Information for authors: The special journal section devoted to risk assessment and management will be published in the January/February 2020 issue of Health Security. Scholarly and review articles, descriptions of practice, and opinion and commentary pieces are welcome. Manuscripts can be up to 5,000 words exclusive of the abstract, tables, figures, and references. Please consult the journal website for specific submission instructions.

Deadline for article submission: Papers must be submitted here by October 15, 2019.

Questions?

Please contact Managing Editor Jackie Fox