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Sebastian Kevany

The Intersection of Global Health, Military Medical intelligence, and National Security in the Management of Transboundary Hazards and Outbreaks

By |2020-07-07T08:43:11-10:00July 1st, 2020|

This paper identifies the many forms of evolving surveillance techniques that could be used for prevention and early warning of global pandemic outbreaks, and the resistance to such monitoring. Excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic-induced, shocking collapse of national and international trade, air travel, and tourism have rocked the world, and brought into stark relief the need for better health and disease surveillance. We have witnessed the global economy brought to its knees by the rapid spread of infection, resulting in widespread illness and many deaths. The rise in nationalism and isolationism, political use of the blame game, along with locked-down peoples [...]

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A Health Security Pandemic Checklist for Developing Nations and Donors

By |2020-06-16T12:24:12-10:00June 12th, 2020|

In this paper, the authors provide a checklist for some of the measures that were proven effective during the COVID-19 pandemic and how developing countries may apply those measures to local conditions. Excerpt: The COVID-19 pandemic presents as a global, complex, public health emergency that varies in impact due to geography, variations in virulence over time and space, response preparation times, available resources, culture, religion, and a host of other possible confounders. Response systems that have shown encouraging quantitative results in one nation may thus be ineffective, or even counterproductive in other places. Developed nations have responded in a variety [...]

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Urgent Policies Required to Grant Public Access to Protected Health Information during Emergency Disease Outbreaks and Pandemics

By |2020-06-10T13:45:09-10:00June 10th, 2020|

This OpEd discuss the pros and cons of using tracking apps to stay ahead of disease outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Excerpt: While some believe that contact tracing apps produce benefits as soon as users increase above 10 percent of a population, there remain PHI-related shortcomings in these approaches because such apps do not actually measure the circumstances that are known to be important in COVID-19 transmission. This lack of accuracy in granular data makes it difficult for both disease managers and individuals to benefit. Apps with inappropriately short infection-interaction algorithms will show too many people as possibly infected (as [...]

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The Nexus Between the COVID-19 Pandemic, International Relations, and International Security

By |2020-05-26T15:46:02-10:00May 26th, 2020|

Excerpt: The extent to which other related global relationships, national entities, and supranational organizations have performed in the current case will only be clear in retrospect: it will quite possibly emerge that a combination of right- and left-wing polices – cherry-picking elements of travel and visa restrictions, greater health security and diplomacy investments, and other defensive and protective policy aspects from the two highly divergent sets of agendas -- will be the guiding paradigm for the decades to come. Despite the mutual antipathy between contemporary political perspectives in the United States, there are elements of each agendas -- what has [...]

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Enabling the sharing of original, timely and creative macro-and micro-level response concepts, systems, and ideas

By |2020-04-03T09:10:12-10:00April 3rd, 2020|

In the opinion of one who has witnessed, and participated in, responses to numerous public health emergencies (PHEs) and epidemic outbreaks throughout the world for many years — from Cholera in Zimbabwe; to Ebola in Sierra Leone; to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Iraq; to all of the longer-term issues associated with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, or malaria in the South Pacific — the government’s response thus far to Ireland’s health security concerns deserves to be complemented, if not yet lauded. (One wonders how a less-developed regime would have dealt with these challenges and the associated need for swift, decisive, and potentially [...]

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