Description of event Physics of Blast Injury Although the exact details of an explosion are rarely available to emergency providers, a basic understanding of explosives and blast-wave physics can help…

Civil unrest , also termed civil disturbance , is a spectrum of activities progressively disruptive to public order and tranquility. Civil unrest can occur whenever a group in the community…

Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have existed since the first time a person used an explosive material in a different manner than that for which it was originally intended. The term…

The term active shooter first entered the medical lexicon after the 1999 Columbine school shootings. A variety of definitions exist for active-shooter events (ASE) and active-shooter and mass-casualty incidents (AS/MCI)….

Description of event Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been abducted or held against their will for a variety of reasons. In ancient times, hostages, usually of noble…

Coordinated simultaneous attacks in multiple geographic locations, both in the United States and abroad, with the intent to kill large numbers of people over minutes, hours, or days have become…

Acknowledgment We thank Dr. Eric Sergienko for his contributions to the first edition of this chapter; portions of Dr. Sergienko’s prior chapter were used in the Historical Perspective section. The…

Terrorism is an elusive term to define, one that seems “far too nimble a creature for social science to be able to pin it down in anything like a reliable…

All disasters—whether natural or human generated—have their own unique epidemiology and patterns of health outcomes on the populations they afflict. Commonly defined, epidemiology is the study of the distribution and…