Emerging technologies for bioweapons defense.

The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) has changed the way we think about national security. The tragic events of Sept.11 have shown us that world of the 21(st) century is clearly a dangerous place. Terrorism, more than ever, affects the very lives of each and every citizens of our country. Al Qaida has proven that it is able to use simple rudimentary methods to invoke strategic economic losses to our society with our own domestic resources as its weapons. The dawn of the new century has brought forth a new kind of asymmetric war where guerilla fighters are armed not with rifles but with technology at the touch of a keyboard. Warfare as we know it has changed and just as the military has its "transformation", medicine so too must have its own transformation in order to protect our citizen against the ever changing threat of bioterrorism. Virtual Reality and its applications can play a vital role in developing new countermeasures to minimize the catastrophic effects of a potential bioterror attack.

Homeland security and virtual reality: building a Strategic Adaptive Response System (STARS).

The advent of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) underscored the need to improve the U.S. disaster response paradigm. Existing systems involve numerous agencies spread across disparate functional and geographic jurisdictions. The current architecture remains vulnerable to sophisticated terrorist strikes. To address these vulnerabilities, we must continuously adapt and improve our Homeland Security architecture. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies will help model those changes and integrate technologies. This paper provides a broad overview of the strategic threats, together with a detailed examination of how specific VR technologies could be used to ensure successful disaster responses.

Reagan, Clinton, tobacco, and children: an interview with C. Everett Koop.

At eighty-seven years of age, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has an extraordinary perspective on health and medicine in America. He reflects on child health from his thirty-five years as a pediatric surgeon; AIDS from his position as Surgeon General at the outset of the epidemic; Presidents Reagan and Clinton, with whom he worked extensively; and smoking from his long battle first in government and then later as public antagonist to what he sees as the duplicitous and deceptive "killer" industry: tobacco.

Cybercare NDMs: an improved strategy for biodefense using information technologies.

The National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) was created in the early 1980's, and it was designed to meet the threats of the time. Today the threats are much less discreet and predictable. They are distributed; they move and spread quickly; and they walk silently among us. Specifically, biological agents are an enemy unlike any we have had to deal with before. They offer unique challenges that fly in the face of current doctrine. We must redesign the NDMS in order to contain and eliminate this new threat. Tools exist today capable of effectively coordinating distributed resources--even through containment borders. We need to strengthen our public health system, create a net-centric disaster management system, and blur the boundaries between local and federal resources. Ultimately we must move from an incremental, echelon-based response to an immediate, continuous response. This can be accomplished by adding inexpensive, well-established information technologies to the existing response system.