Call for Papers

The BWC at 50: Envisioning the Next 50 Years of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention

In 1975, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) entered into force as the first international treaty to ban an entire class of weapons. For 50 years, the BWC has stood as a pillar of global disarmament and nonproliferation, alongside other major treaties such as the 1925 Geneva Protocol (which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But while these treaties share many similarities, the BWC differs in several important ways, including the absence of a treaty implementation protocol and verification regime and a dearth of funding, personnel, and other resources to support treaty activities and compliance. Despite technical, practical, and political barriers to making concrete progress toward strengthening the treaty and its implementation, the norm against biological weapons has largely held fast for 5 decades, without any major biological weapons incidents or overt offensive biological programs—certainly not the case with chemical and nuclear weapons.

The milestone 50th anniversary of the BWC’s entry into force provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the treaty’s history and successes as well as its current struggles and future promise. Building on 5 decades of experience and lessons, what will the next half-century bring? Will future generations of diplomats and scientists view the BWC as a cornerstone of global arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation or as a noble, yet shortsighted—or worse, failed—effort to prevent the devastating effects of one of the most abhorrent weapons ever conceived by humankind? With limited resources to allocate to biological weapons nonproliferation—and countless competing challenges and priorities—BWC states parties face an uphill battle, if they hope to take concrete steps toward strengthening the treaty at the 10th Review Conference in 2027 and beyond.

In 2025, Health Security will devote a Special Feature to the next 50 years of the BWC, including priorities, policies, programs, and activities to strengthen the treaty, its implementation, and associated biological weapons nonproliferation norms in the face of emerging and future biological capabilities and threats. Many of the challenges currently facing the BWC are the same challenges that have plagued the treaty throughout its first 5 decades, and as we look ahead to the next half-century, creative and novel solutions are needed to break the ongoing stalemate on critical issues. We encourage submissions to draw on lessons from the past, but they should focus on a forward-looking component that addresses the BWC challenges and solutions over the next 10, 25, or 50 years.

Article topics may include:

• Past is prologue: With BWC verification on the table for the first time in more than 20 years, how can states parties navigate the challenges that derailed the previous treaty protocol negotiations in 2001?
• Increasing assurance: In the absence of formal declarations, inspections, and other compliance assessment or verification-related obligations, how can states parties foster certainty and mitigate ambiguity and concern regarding treaty compliance?
• The fullest possible exchange: In the face of ever-expanding access to emerging biological capabilities and an increasingly competitive global bioeconomy, how can states parties effectively mitigate biological weapons risks while ensuring the broadest access to biology for peaceful purposes?
• Emerging capabilities and threats: How can the BWC remain responsive to emerging and future biological tools and techniques that were inconceivable in 1975, especially as biology expands into adjacent technical fields and leverages emerging capabilities that were previously independent of the life sciences?
• Sustainable resources: How can states parties address the financial instability and uncertainty that have limited the treaty’s ability to provide the kinds of institutional, operational, and technical support that are core components of other WMD treaties?
• Working outside the system: In an increasingly challenging geopolitical environment that severely limits the prospect of achieving consensus, how can states parties implement solutions outside the formal umbrella of the treaty? What are the roles of civil society, international organizations (eg, WHO, WOAH), and private sector business and industry in implementing and strengthening the BWC?

Questions about topics related to this special feature may be directed to Matthew Shearer (mshearer@jhu.edu) or Amanda Mui (amui@jhu.edu), and questions about the journal and the submission process may be directed to Kathleen Fox (kathi.fox@jhu.edu).

Health Security, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., is a bi‐monthly peer‐reviewed journal, now in its 22nd year of publication. It serves as an international forum for debate and exploration of the key strategic, scientific, and operational issues posed by biological weapons, pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to global health. The journal provides multidisciplinary analyses and perspectives essential to the creation of strategies and programs that can diminish the consequences of health emergencies, epidemics, and disasters. 

The journal’s international audience includes those professional communities that have strategic, scientific, or operational responsibilities critical to improving health security, including medicine, public health, law, national security, bioscientific research, agriculture, food safety, and drug and vaccine development. 

Health Security is indexed in MEDLINE; PubMed; PubMed Central; Current Contents®/Social & Behavioral Sciences; Social Sciences Citation Index®; Social SciSearch®; Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition; EMBASE/Excerpta Medica; EMBiology; Scopus; ProQuest; CAB Abstracts; and Global Health. 

Information for authors: Scholarly and review articles, case studies, and commentary manuscripts are welcome. Commentaries should be no longer than 2,500 words, case studies no longer than 4,000 words, and original research articles no longer than 5,000 words, exclusive of the abstract, tables, figures, and references. Please consult the journal website (http://www.liebertpub.com/manuscript/hs) or the journal’s managing editor (kathi.fox@jhu.edu) for specific submission instructions.

Indoor Air Quality, Airborne Pathogens, and Pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused about 20 million deaths worldwide, and at least 65 million people suffer from its chronic sequelae. The first wave of the pandemic severely stressed health systems and other critical infrastructure, causing substantial economic and political disruptions. While the effects of the pandemic are still being felt, we need to begin preparations for the future. COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic caused by an airborne pathogen, and it is possible that the next pandemic could be even more severe. One of the crucial ways to mitigate the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and other airborne pathogens is to improve indoor air quality (IAQ). Improvements in IAQ have the potential to save millions of lives.

Although a fair amount of literature discusses how IAQ improvements affected COVID-19 transmission, we still need creative thinking and sound evidence to inform the future policy landscape. In 2025, Health Security will devote a special feature to the discussion of IAQ, with authors from a diverse range of disciplines and backgrounds responding to the following questions: What specific improvements in IAQ on infectious disease transmission rates and disease severity can be achieved? What policies, anywhere in the world, can help to bring technologies and practices where they may have the most benefit? What innovative approaches should be explored to improve IAQ in a variety of indoor environments? What evidence do we have that new advances in IAQ technology, including sensors, filtration, and disinfection, can help stop the next pandemic? What evidentiary gaps are left to be filled and how should research funders prioritize support for future research needs in this area?

Potential topics may include:

• Modeling How IAQ Improvements May Affect Disease Transmission in a New Respiratory Pandemic: How and to what extent can IAQ improvements lead to decreased transmission and increased time to develop medical countermeasures like diagnostic tests, vaccines, and therapeutics? What is the probability that IAQ improvements can reduce the impact of an infectious disease, including leading to containment? 
• Case Studies of IAQ and Disease Transmission: How did IAQ improvements lead to changes in transmission rates in COVID-19 or other diseases, in building types or situations not well studied in the existing literature? We are especially interested in case studies of IAQ improvements and disease risk in nonhealthcare critical infrastructure, especially cases of null results or implementation mistakes that lead to crucial lessons learned.
• Standards, Laws, and Policy Reviews: What is the state of IAQ laws and policies in different jurisdictions worldwide? How did those laws affect COVID-19 pandemic responses? What could be good models for others to follow? What standards or policy papers about IAQ and disease have been produced by nongovernmental organizations, and what was their impact?
• Law and Policy Proposals: What changes should be made to legal or regulatory systems to enable IAQ improvements, such as those detailed in ASHRAE standard 241, as a response to future emerging threats? What laws or institutional changes can be put into place so that IAQ can rapidly be used as an effective nonpharmaceutical intervention? For example, a discussion of exactly how US state and local health departments could call for the activation of Standard 241 would be valuable.
• Commentaries or Analysis on Regulatory or Legislative Proposals: What bills are being proposed in various jurisdictions, and what regulatory agencies are working on new standards? An overview and comparison of different proposals would be valuable, as would commentaries on, or legal or economic analysis of, specific proposals.
• International Perspectives: We are interested in studies of the previous questions worldwide, especially in developing countries.
• Novel Technologies, Such as Pathogen Sensing: What novel sensing technologies have the potential to automatically produce signals that are highly correlated with the presence of dangerous pathogens? What would it take for such technologies to be advanced and ultimately adopted? How can these be integrated into building control systems to automatically increase ventilation when these signals are found?
• Green and Healthy Buildings: What complementarities or tradeoffs exist when considering both improved IAQ and reduced energy usage? What policies or technologies are necessary to ensure that green building upgrades also improve health and protect against pandemics?
• Other Explorations for IAQ and Infectious Diseases

Questions about topics related to this special feature may be directed to Richard Bruns (bruns@jhu.edu), and questions about the journal and the submission process may be directed to Kathleen Fox (kathi.fox@jhu.edu).

Health Security, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., is a bimonthly peer‐reviewed journal. It serves as an international forum for debate and exploration of the key strategic, scientific, and operational issues posed by biological weapons, pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to global health. The journal provides multidisciplinary analyses and perspectives essential to the creation of strategies and programs that can diminish the consequences of health emergencies, epidemics, and disasters.

The journal’s international audience includes those professional communities that have strategic, scientific, or operational responsibilities critical to improving health security, including medicine, public health, law, national security, bioscientific research, agriculture, food safety, and drug and vaccine development.

Health Security is indexed in MEDLINE; PubMed; PubMed Central; Current Contents®/Social & Behavioral Sciences; Social Sciences Citation Index®; Social SciSearch®; Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition; EMBASE/Excerpta Medica; EMBiology; Scopus; ProQuest; CAB Abstracts; and Global Health.

Information for authors: Scholarly and review articles, case studies, and commentary manuscripts are welcome. Commentaries should be no longer than 2,500 words, case studies no longer than 4,000 words, and original research articles no longer than 5,000 words, exclusive of the abstract, tables, figures, and references. Please consult the journal website for specific submission instructions (http://www.liebertpub.com/manuscript/hs) or the journal’s managing editor (kathi.fox@jhu.edu) for specific submission instructions.