INTRODUCTION Public health agencies have been participating in emergency preparedness exercises for many years. A poorly designed or executed exercise, or an unevaluated or inadequately evaluated plan, may do more harm than good if it leads to a false sense of security, and results in poor performance during an actual emergency. At the time this project began, there were no specific standards f...

BACKGROUND In 2003, 11 public health epidemiologists were placed in North Carolina's largest hospitals to enhance communication between public health agencies and healthcare systems for improved emergency preparedness. We describe the specific services public health epidemiologists provide to local health departments, the North Carolina Division of Public Health, and the hospitals in which they...

Large-scale public health emergencies require a sophisticated, coordinated response involving multiple entities to protect health and minimize suffering. However, the rarity of such emergencies presents a barrier to gathering observational data about the effectiveness of the public health response before such events occur. For this reason, public health practitioners increasingly have relied on...

THE TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES OF POPULATION SCIENCES ARE EXTREMELY RELEVANT TO THE DISCIPLINE OF PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS: protecting and securing the population's health requires information about that population. While related fields such as security studies have successfully integrated demographic tools into their research and literature, the theoretical and practical connection betwe...

HYPOTHESIS The public health system has a specialized body of knowledge and expertise in bioterrorism and public health emergency management that can assist in the development and delivery of continuing medical education programs to meet the needs of emergency medical service providers. METHODS A nationally representative sample of the basic and paramedic emergency medical service providers i...

BACKGROUND The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis of 2003 provided a new urgency in China in terms of preparing public health staff to respond effectively to public health emergencies. Although the Chinese Government has already carried out a series of emergency education and training programmes to improve public health staff's capability of emergency preparedness, it remains uncle...