Topic Editors:

Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH, and Amanda Kobokovich, MPH

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Baltimore, Maryland

The year 2019 marks the 165th anniversary of the Broad Street cholera outbreak, which resulted in more than 500 deaths in the Soho neighborhood of London. This outbreak marked a critical turning point in both public and academic perceptions of disease transmission when it became known that cholera was being transmitted through a specific water pump. John Snow, a medical doctor, created a simple spot map to identify the Broad Street pump as the most likely source of the outbreak. Thus, spatial/temporal modeling became foundational in epidemiology and remains vital to modern outbreak investigations.

Since 1854, mapping techniques and data imaging have greatly evolved in complexity and accessibility. Emerging infectious diseases pose a significant threat to global health in our increasingly interconnected world, and advanced techniques to detect these outbreaks are critical to mitigating morbidity and mortality.

A special feature in Health Security will be devoted to geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, spatial/temporal analysis, and disease modeling as they pertain to the prevention, detection, or prediction of infectious disease outbreaks that threaten public health security. This special issue seeks papers that focus on infectious diseases with moderate to high potential to cause pandemics in human, animal, or plant populations. 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 GIS or disease modeling programs are welcome.

Topics might include:

• Ongoing research into the future of outbreak prediction and response—challenges, solutions, and/or review of the current landscape
• Novel spatial/temporal techniques to predict trends in emerging infectious diseases or in existing high-consequence pathogens
• How surveillance, modeling, or GIS techniques influence policy surrounding pathogens of high consequence on the local, national, and international scales
• Analysis of the ethics of open-source surveillance and how scientists can incorporate these issues into better practices
• Review/analysis of past usage of GIS or remote sensing to mitigate disease outbreaks
• Analysis of benefits/challenges of open-source surveillance databases to monitor and prevent the development of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons

Deadline for submisson: January 30, 2019

Health Security, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed journal, now in its 16th 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 advances in infectious disease mapping and surveillance will be published in the May/June 2019 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.