In this article emergency response in addressed in the sense that if preemptive measures are not taken and the socioeconomic factors preventing care are not taken into consideration the United States and the world is at risk of a pandemic. If this occurs, there is uncertainty in what the appropriate response would be as the scale and complexities of the biological agent will be unknown.
The methods used to produce this article was the knowledge of the two authors and the research that they have done as well as the use of think tanks and other articles on public health.
“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.
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 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.
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.