Homeland Security: From Mathematical Models to Policy Implementation

It describes the author’s research on four topics in homeland security and public health: preparedness and response to a bioterror anthrax attack, preparedness and response to a bioterror attack on the food supply, routes of transmission and infection control for pandemic influenza, and biometrics (e.g., fingerprint matching) to prevent terrorists from entering the country. The paper focuses on the modeling, policy recommendations, and implementation of these recommendations. The author draws lessons about policy implementation from these examples and from examples from his other homeland security work with colleagues, including a bioterror smallpox attack, preventing nuclear weapons from entering the country on a shipping container, preventing nuclear weapons from entering a city, and preventing terrorists from crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.

I suggest adding social science to complement the natural science. One could argue that for all the devastation including loss of life on 9/11/01, a dominating outcome was the psychological response of the citizens of the USA. 9/11 caused a national trauma of immense proportions. The economy suffered greatly, as it took a long time for people again to feel comfortable getting back onto airplanes. Certain national policies that followed most likely were over-reactions to the trauma of 9/11. Especially in the case of terrorists, their ultimate aim is not the immediate loss of lives and infliction of numerous injuries; it is paralysis of the country due to national trauma, grief and despair. Adding a social science component to already superlative work would be in the nest traditions of Philip M. Morse. His teams during WWII were interdisciplinary, often including social scientists to cover those important aspects of the problem that perhaps ‘could not be seen’ or articulated by the natural scientists, engineers and mathematicians. It is noteworthy that many founding members of ORSA were social scientists. Isn’t it time we invited them back – to INFORMS?

Larry’s work has unquestionably and positively influenced US government policy on homeland security measures and strategies. He and his co-authors study on confronting an anthrax attack and dispensing of medical counter measures ignited a chain of useful reactions to public health policies and initiatives on rapid and strategic bio-response. Time-constrained casualty mitigation in an anthrax attack demands rapid protection that goes well beyond existing health systems capabilities. Much of my work with CDC since 2003 focuses on enhancing those capabilities. This includes rapidly determining and setting up optimal locations for dispensing sites, efficient clinic layout design, optimal staffng, intra-facility disease propagation and mitigation strategies, and subsequent clean-up and long-term economic impact.

Engineers seem to have an interesting, and somewhat unique, definition of “fun.” Ask your doctor or a local public health official what defines a good time, and you are not likely to hear about the logistics of mass antibiotic distribution or mathematical models of influenza transmission. Larry Wein’s opus over the last decade has been, to use a hackneyed phrase, deadly serious, and yet he notes that a personal criterion for his engagement in a project is that it be enjoyable. For those of us in public health emergency response, this provides an important insight into the workings of the engineering mind, since it is precisely those things that we often avoid (i.e., the nitty gritty, and
by that I mean quantitative, evaluation of the feasibility and performance of the programs we plan and carry out in the name of health protection) that appeal to Prof. Wein and a relatively small number of colleagues. Capitalizing on that sense of adventure into the unknown could bring about important advances not only in public health, but in medical care more generally. What is needed is a new generation of engineers who can speak the language of health care (and vice versa), and who then step into the unknown in much the way Prof. Wein describes to discover the important unsolved (or avoided, as the case may be) problems.

As a junior tenure-track professor intent on improving security and defense policy, I was eager to read Larry Wein’s article “Homeland Security: From Mathematical Models to Policy Implementation.” Dr. Wein has made impressive contributions to public debate of homeland security, and he seems to have found the secret formula for success, namely: (1) find an important, real security problem that nobody has addressed adequately; (2) solve it, even if you have to make a lot of assumptions about underlying details and science; (3) brief it to Congress and/or the White House; and (4) publish an Op-Ed in the New York Times. But somehow I get the sense that it was, and should be, harder than that.

My own limited experience suggests that policy issues are rarely as clean as suggested here, and that there often exist considerable tensions even within the Science and Technology (S&T) community on any one of these topics. Confusion (or disagreement) among S&T experts becomes a quagmire when it comes to debate among non-technical policy-makers, as we see every day in the newspapers on topics ranging from global warming, to health care, to the economy. Perhaps Wein was careful to steer clear of topics that he thought would get bogged down in controversy. If so, this seems an important omission from his criteria for problem choice.