Everyone: In the next few days Nick Shapiro will be joining the discussion with a post relating to some preliminary work he is doing on zoonotic disease preparedness — particularly on the problem of creating surveillance systems that will be able to identify emergent animal diseases that may be likely to cross the species barrier. Hopefully he will post both a general text introducing the topic and a more specific text about an interview he recently conducted.

Nick is currently a graduate student getting his MPhil in Medical Anthropology at Oxford. His work is very much related to many of our concerns, and seems to directly connect with many of the topics in Biosecurity Interventions, particularly the chapters by Keck and by Bingham and Hinchliffe, among others. 

So — welcome!