When the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, public safety departments at four-year institutions of higher education in the U.S. were vulnerable. This vulnerability was because of the limited time they had to initiate their pandemic response to help protect their campus communities, and the need to create or revise institutional emergency response…

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for enhanced outbreak preparedness against viruses. Key elements to this preparedness are robust disease surveillance systems and effective interventions to minimize disease transmission. While individual clinical testing is the conventional disease surveillance approach, environmental…

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in early 2020. With it, came a range of concerns, panic, and scrambling for "quick fixes," as families learned to navigate rapid and sometimes confusing pandemic changes. Thirty million Americans were under- or uninsured at the start of the pandemic, so both preventive measures and access to…

Young adults are very socially active. During infectious disease outbreaks, their interpersonal interactions serve as a mode of viral transmission, especially to vulnerable populations such as the elderly and immunocompromised. A lack of compliance with recommended health behaviors among college students during the early months of the COVID-19…

Purpose: The overall purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which school level (i.e., elementary, middle, and high schools) and school urbanicity (i.e., city, suburb, town, and rural) were related to written safety plans (i.e., active shooter, hostage, bomb, and pandemic flu/disease threats) and drilled safety…

The goal of the research is to help government agencies and non-profit-organizations (NPOs) better prepare for events that require a point-of-dispensing (POD) unit. The research team developed a training exercise that simulated a real world anthrax outbreak, by using groups of untrained nursing and pharmacy students. These students were then…

Planning for a pandemic influenza outbreak at a college or university cannot be done in a vacuum. Like any emergency plan, it needs to be a coordinated effort by a dedicated and unselfish group of individuals at the university pulling together a multitude of people and resources focused on a common goal. There is an ongoing struggle among…