Search

“In all of them, we find that health experts, policy advocates, and politicians have competing visions about how to characterize the problem of biosecurity and about what constitutes the most appropriate response.”

“even experts who understand that social issues such as poverty and deteriorating health infrastructure are critical determinants of disease risk may propose narrower technical measures given the difficulty of implementing more ambitious schemes.”

“They suggest that the uncertainties endemic to contemporary biosecurity threats such as avian flu point to the need to develop new ways of living with and managing the possibility of outbreaks that are more nuanced than current attempts to achieve absolute security at the expense of local wellbeing.”

In addition to this article I looked up more information about WHO, drug-resistant TB, and biological terrorism. 

On the ResearchGate website, the article was cited 28 times in other works; the top 3 studies/ articles were: "A Pre-Event Configuration for Biological Threats", "Airports, localities and disease", and "Repositioning the Front Lines?: Reflections on the Ethnography of African Stereotypes". 

The authors used reports and statistics from international health organizations such as WHO. They also gathered information from think tanks like RAND. Additionally, to support the claims made in this article the authors looked at how biological outbreaks and threats were dealt with in the past, specifically World War II and the wars with Iran. 

The bibliography for this article included various other articles and papers on global outbreaks and public health. The resources the authors used implies that this article was written in a manner that considered lots of perspectives and research. 

The article cites other reports, experts in various fields, and notes historical events (previous epidemics, disease outbreaks, bioterrorism) to support its arguments for biosecurity. 

The main argument of this article is that “biosecurity” is not just a national security issue but a worldwide issue.  Biosecurity is effected by many things including emerging diseases, bioterrorism, food safety, and the “cutting edge of life sciences.” 

This article has been referenced in various books about the global health and international relations. 

1. "as Richard Danzig has argued in the case of bioterrorism, despite the striking increase in funding for biodefense in the U.S., there is still no 'common conceptual framework' that might bring various efforts together and make it possible to assess their adequacy."

2. “Who should lead the fight against disease? Who should pay for it? And what are the best strategies and tactics to adopt?”

3. In contrast to classic public health, preparedness does not draw on statistical records of past events. Rather, it employs imaginative techniques of enactment such as scenarios, exercises, and analytical models to simulate uncertain future threats.

4. emergency response is acute, short-term, focused on alleviating what is conceived as a temporally circumscribed event; whereas “social” interventions—such as those associated with development policy—focus on transforming political-economic structures over the long term

Andrew Lakoff works in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California Los Angeles. He studies social theory and is a medical anthropologist. While he is not directly situated within the emergency response system, his knowledge from studying past events and how the system works may provide insight into better emergency response techniques.

Stephan Collier is a Doctor of Philosophy and works at The New School. While he is also not situated within the emergency response system, his outside views and understandings could help to improve techniques used by providers.