Transportation and Distribution of Strategic National Stockpile Supplies in a Public Health Emergency

In the event of a public health emergency in the United States, it is important that public authorities are equipped to distribute medical supplies to every person in need as quickly as possible. Federal guidelines state that all persons in an area affected by a public health emergency should receive their medical countermeasures within 48 hours of the emergency’s declaration. While the CDC has determined a general dispensing plan for each state and county to follow, it is ultimately up to the state and county to formalize and implement detailed plans. A body of academic literature focuses on optimizing the placement and operation of Points of Dispensing (PODs), which are mass dispensing locations the public visits to receive countermeasures. However, very few papers have considered the logistics associated with moving countermeasures from state receiving areas to county-level PODs. This research addresses this gap through service network design and transportation modeling. Specifically, the feasibility of a multi-tiered distribution model is evaluated for a case study region representative of a US state comprised of a mix of urban and rural areas

The Stellar Content of Obscured Galactic Giant H II Regions IV.: NGC3576

We present deep, high angular resolution near-infrared images of the obscured Galactic Giant H II region NGC3576. Our images reach objects to ~3M_sun. We collected high signal-to-noise K-band spectra of eight of the brightest objects, some of which are affected by excess emission and some which follow a normal interstellar reddening law. None of them displayed photospheric features typical of massive OB type stars. This indicates that they are still enshrouded in their natal cocoons. The K-band brightest source (NGC3576 #48) shows CO 2.3 micron bandhead emission, and three others have the same CO feature in absorption. Three sources display spatially unresolved H_2 emission, suggesting dense shocked regions close to the stars. We conclude that the remarkable object NGC3576 #48 is an early-B/late-O star surrounded by a thick circumstellar disk. A number of other relatively bright cluster members also display excess emission in the K-band, indicative of reprocessing disks around massive stars (YSOs). Such emission appears common in other Galactic Giant H II regions we have surveyed. The IMF slope of the cluster, Gamma = -1.51, is consistent with Salpeter's distribution and similar to what has been observed in the Magellanic Cloud clusters and in the periphery of our Galaxy.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in A