Managing terror. Public health officials learn lessons from bioterrorism attacks

When a photo-journalist presented with the first case of inhalation anthrax in the United States in 23 years, it marked the worse case of biological terrorism in our nation's history. It also marked a significant management challenge for numerous local, state and federal officials. Review what was learned and how we can better prepare for future attacks.     

Psychosemantics of “One-China” Conception: Fourth-Dimensional Resolution of Taiwan-Mainland Political Deadlock1

The political conflicts between Taiwan and the Mainland have progressed, for over 50 years, from the historical “hot civil war” for the “exclusive ownership” of one China’s territorial sovereignty to the contemporary “cold rhetoric circularity” around the “geopolitical symbolism” of the one-Chinaprinciple. In the process, the United States has been intimately entangled in the disputes in terms of 3 alignment stages-from an “unambiguous pro-Taiwan” before the 1970s, the “ambiguous neutrality” in the early 1970s, to the contemporary “pro-Mainland China.” Despite the fact that during the past 3 decades the United States honored the arms sales and the Taiwan Relations Act commitments in Taiwan’s favor, and simultaneously conferred the “3 Nos” and 3 communiques in Mainland China’s favor, the cross-Strait tensions have persisted without the prospect of a definitive foreseeable resolution. Further, because of the lack of explicit conception of “one China,” the United States has to constantly resist the opposing persuasions of the 2 sides, and therefore must continue to rely on the “ambiguous dual deterrence strategy” for maintaining the “dynamics balance” over the Taiwan Strait. For such endeavors, the Clinton “4 frameworks” and the Bush “5 Taiwan policies” have proven to be very effective, but mostly to the extent of assuming a “passive” role in preventing military confrontations.     

An unconditional space–time scan statistic for ZIP‐distributed data

A scan statistic is proposed for the prospective monitoring of spatiotemporal count data with an excess of zeros. The method that is based on an outbreak model for the zero‐inflated Poisson distribution is shown to be superior to traditional scan statistics based on the Poisson distribution in the presence of structural zeros. The spatial accuracy and the detection timeliness of the proposed scan statistic are investigated by means of simulation, and an application on the weekly cases of Campylobacteriosis in Germany illustrates how the scan statistic could be used to detect emerging disease outbreaks. An implementation of the method is provided in the open‐source R package scanstatistics available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network.     

Si-GARCH: Construction and validation of a new method for the detection of breaking points in models

In this article, we define a new method (Si-GARCH) for signal segmentation based on a class of models coming from econometrics. We make use of these models not to perform prediction but to characterize portions of signals. This enables us to compare these portions in order to determine if there is a change in the signal’s dynamics and to define breaking points with an aim of segmenting it according to its dynamics. We, then, expand these models by defining a new coefficient to improve their accuracy. The Si-GARCH method was tested on several thousands of hours of biomedical signals coming from intensive care units.     

Household allocation decisions and child health: can behavioral responses to vitamin A supplementation programs explain heterogeneous effects?

Biological research predicts that giving children vitamin A supplements will significantly reduce mortality from diarrheal and respiratory infections, but evaluations of supplementation programs in the field have produced a wide range of estimated mortality effects. In this paper, I explain these differences by differential household behavioral responses to programs. I find evidence that the mortality effect varies by observable determinants of household allocation to children. Additionally, I find that households improve malaria prevention for children that receive vitamin A supplements and that this effect varies by the same household allocation determinants.     

Places for Place‐Based Policy

Place‐based policy is both ubiquitous and widely criticised. The conventional economic case against place‐targeted interventions is strong, relegating its application to a narrow range of cases of immobile labour resources, market imperfections and/or other externalities. However, both internationally and domestically, equity considerations lead to policies and programmes for disadvantaged regions and their populations. Budget constraints and accountability suggest a selection or ‘triage’ process targeting places with the highest returns in contributing to social welfare. Furthermore, the challenges facing rural areas may be fundamentally different in developed from developing countries. This article proposes a framework for assessing places appropriate for place‐based policies, using the examples of Canada, Chile and Peru.