Active-Shooter Response
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)….
Hostage Taking
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…
Multimodality, Layered Attack
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…
Integrated Response to Terrorist Attacks
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…
Thinking Outside the Box: Health Service Support Considerations in the Era of Asymmetric Threats
In revising this chapter for the second edition of this text, it is interesting to review our “outside the box” thoughts from nearly 10 years ago. Defining “the box” is…
The Psychology of Terrorism
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…
Practical Applications of Disaster Epidemiology
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…
Measures of Effectiveness in Disaster Management
Measures of effectiveness (MOEs) define quantitative and qualitative management tools that provide means for measuring the effectiveness, performance, and outcome of an operation, strategy, or project. They allude to a…
Lessons Learned as a Result of Terrorist Attacks
Acknowledgment A special thank you to my mentor, Kenneth Grey (retired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] branch chief and developer of the CDC’s first emergency operations unit and…
Rehabilitation and Reconstruction
There are four phases of emergency management as noted in the following: 1. Preparedness: Planning a response to a disaster. 2. Response: Activities that occur immediately after a disaster. These…
