Emerging health threats: why do they need a new journal?

This editorial heralds the online publication of a new, international, peer-reviewed, open access journal, dedicated to emerging threats to human health. The Journal is an initiative of the Emerging Health Threats Forum, an independent, not-for-profit association that was established with support from the UK's Health Protection Agency. This Journal builds on the Forum's extensive emerging health threats news service and weekly Emerging Health Threats Monitor, with original research articles, in-depth reviews, perspectives, commentaries, and policy reviews on emerging health threats. 1 Policy reviews catalogue strategies used to address threats, and appraise their effectiveness. Unique to the Emerging Health Threats Journal will be a new article type on strategic lessons learned. This will capture the critical lessons in disaster and other crisis responses that are often overlooked until they are relearned yet again in the next disaster. What are emerging health threats and why is a new journal needed? Emerging health threats are the myriad of new and evolving health issues that society faces on a daily basis, including new infectious diseases, chemical and environmental hazards, radiation exposure, disasters, and cultural and population health issues. One issue of the Emerging Health Threats Monitor alone includes topics as diverse as the effects of climate change on developing countries, the effects of traffic pollution on children, the fatal impact of environmental arsenic, and the outbreak of Rift Valley fever in the Comoros Islands. 2 There is a wide range of journals that provide coverage in narrow fields of emerging health threats, particularly in areas such as infectious disease and disaster medicine, and some, such as Emerging Infectious Disease, are also available online and in an open access format. A review of the US National Library of Medicine PubMed Database, however, shows that many key articles are in very dissimilar and sometimes difficult to access journals, from, for example, the Journal of Veterinary Science to the Danish Medical Bulletin. The need to provide comprehensive reviews and original papers for a wide audience, particularly in an open access format, has led to the creation of this Journal. This Journal is not aiming to compete with the more specialised journals but seeks to identify and quantify the emerging trends in the public health and health protection arena that will focus of future research and publications in this and other journals. Open access journals have become increasingly popular, with a number of professional associations and organisations making …