CALL FOR PAPERS:

Health Security

Special Feature: Emerging Pathogens and Health Security: Improving Public Health and Health Care to Address Increasing Globalization of Emerging Infectious Disease Threats

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Topic Editors:

Amesh A. Adalja, MD, and Matthew P. Shearer, MPH
UPMC Center for Health Security, Baltimore, Maryland

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Deadline for manuscript submission: December 31, 2016

As seen in recent international health events involving Ebola, MERS, and Zika, emerging infectious diseases are playing an increasingly important role in health security across the planet. Diseases once confined to specific geographic areas can now rapidly cross borders and oceans to affect wholly naïve populations, and some of these diseases—like Zika, known to exist for decades with a relatively low health burden in affected areas—are having new and profound health impacts on these populations.

A special feature in Health Security will be devoted to analysis of systems and strategies to identify and respond to emerging infectious disease threats, both nationally and internationally. The Journal seeks papers that address the wide range of policy, practice, and research issues relevant to analysis and enhancement of such strategies and systems. Additionally, narrative or conceptual reviews of specific microbes or classes of microbes will be sought.

Topics might include:

• infectious disease pathogen surveillance in populations of interest;
• strategic frameworks for coordinating national or international response to unknown or emerging infectious disease events;
• evaluation and analysis of local, national, or international response plans and activities for emerging infectious disease incidents;
• activity reports of response agencies in the aftermath of emerging infectious disease cases (eg, primary amebic meningoencephalitis, Marburg);
• horizon scanning risk assessments to identify emerging pathogens that pose significant risk to global health security (including veterinary and plant pathogens);
• implications of new research in astrobiology, Archae, and prions; and
• reviews of emerging infectious diseases and pathogens with little existing or recent literature—such as, for example, Menangle virus.

Articles on other aspects of emerging infectious diseases and health security are also welcome.

Health Security (formerly Biosecurity and Bioterrorism), is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed journal, now in its 14th 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 emerging pathogens and health security will be published in the May/June 2017 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.

The deadline for manuscript submissions is December 31, 2016. Papers must be submitted via our online manuscript and peer review system.