Progress in High-Level Isolation for the Care of Patients with High-Consequence Infectious Diseases
Topic Editors:
Eric Toner, MD, and Matthew P. Shearer, MPH
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,
Baltimore, Maryland
The fifth anniversary of the onset of the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic—which resulted in more than 20,000 cases and 11,000 deaths as well as the first transmission of Ebolavirus infection outside of Africa—provides an opportunity to reflect on efforts in recent years to build and maintain capacity for the advanced treatment of patients infected with high-consequence pathogens. Additionally, as public health and healthcare organizations around the world expand high-consequence infectious disease preparedness activities beyond Ebola to address respiratory and other dangerous pathogens, this is an opportune time to assess remaining gaps in health sector response and identify focus areas for future research and policy development for these other pathogens.
A special feature in Health Security will be devoted to analysis of programs, policies, and systems as well as ongoing and future research and policy efforts that address public health and healthcare preparedness for the treatment of patients with high-consequence infectious diseases. 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 healthcare or public health programs established to address high-consequence pathogens are welcome.
Topics might include:
- Advances in high-level isolation unit design, operations, staffing, and utilization
- Local, national, or international response plans and activities for delivery of care to high-consequence infectious disease patients
- International-, national-, and local-level programs implemented to facilitate research, preparedness, and policymaking to support public health and healthcare preparedness for and response to high-consequence infectious diseases
- Ongoing research efforts aimed at better understanding clinical care requirements and potential limitations for suspect and confirmed high-consequence infectious disease patients
- Risk and gap analysis for existing high-consequence pathogen planning, preparedness, response, and research agendas with a focus on identifying future research, operations, and policy priorities and requirements
- Review of potential high-consequence pathogens, known and unknown, including the characteristics that would warrant (or not) this designation and/or the various considerations they would require in developing and maintaining clinical care capacity
Articles on other aspects of high-consequence pathogens and high-level isolation are also welcome; however, strictly clinical articles would not be appropriate.
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 high-consequence infectious disease patient isolation will be published in the January/February 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.