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Increased demand for medical supplies, and specifically respirators and face masks, during the Covid-19 pandemic along with the inability of legitimate suppliers to meet these needs created a window of opportunity for counterfeiters to capitalize on the supply chain disruptions caused by a global health crisis. Both legitimate and illicit businesses began shifting their scope from sectors such as textiles to producing and distributing personal protective equipment (PPE), many of which were counterfeit or unauthentic products and thus unable to properly protect users. To study cost-effective disruption strategies, this study proposes a simulation-optimization framework. The framework is used to model counterfeiters’ behavior and analyze the effectiveness of different disruption strategies for counterfeit PPE supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

This study examines the characteristics of hotels that have become critical locales for exploiting sex trafficking victims in all regions of the United States. In recent years, almost all the hotels named in the numerous civil suits filed by victims of human trafficking in US federal courts were in urban areas. The article focuses on the attributes of the hotels where the exploitation has been documented. The hotels are analyzed in terms of their price level and rating, their spatial distribution within cities, and the neighbourhood’s economic attributes. The analysis concludes that the hotels/motels are located close to major highways and airports, are primarily economy hotels, and three-quarters of named hotels are in poorer urban neighbourhoods. Yet one quarter are higher-end hotels reflecting the affluence of the customers. Strategies to address the problem are provided. 

Legitimate companies are key facilitators of human trafficking. These corporate facilitators include not only websites providing advertisements for commercial sex services but also hotels and motels. Analysis of all active federal criminal sex trafficking cases in 2018 and 2019 reveals that in approximately 80% of these cases, victims were exploited at either hotels or motels. This paper studies the prevalence of the hospitality industry in the crime of sex trafficking and the failure of this industry to address this problem until recent civil suits were filed by victims against individual hotels and chains. Drawing on the civil cases filed in federal courts by victims of human trafficking between 2015 and 2021 along the East Coast of the United States, this paper assesses the characteristics of these hotels and the conditions in the hotels that facilitated sex trafficking. The paper then explores the moral and ethical problems posed by the facilitating role of hotel owners/operators in sex trafficking either through collusion or failure to act on and/or report evidence of individual abuse. Suggestions on how to address the problem are provided. 

Existing collaborations among public health practitioners, veterinarians, and ecologists do not sufficiently consider illegal wildlife trade in their surveillance, biosafety, and security (SB&S) efforts even though the risks to health and biodiversity from these threats are significant. We highlight multiple cases to illustrate the risks posed by existing gaps in understanding the intersectionality of the illegal wildlife trade and zoonotic disease transmission. We argue for more integrative science in support of decision-making using the One Health approach. Opportunities abound to apply transdisciplinary science to sustainable wildlife trade policy and programming, such as combining on-the-ground monitoring of health, environmental, and social conditions with an understanding of the operational and spatial dynamics of illicit wildlife trade. We advocate for (1) a surveillance sample management system for enhanced diagnostic efficiency in collaboration with diverse and local partners that can help establish new or link existing surveillance networks, outbreak analysis, and risk mitigation strategies; (2) novel analytical tools and decision support models that can enhance self-directed local livelihoods by addressing monitoring, detection, prevention, interdiction, and remediation; (3) enhanced capacity to promote joint SB&S efforts that can encourage improved human and animal health, timely reporting, emerging disease detection, and outbreak response; and, (4) enhanced monitoring of illicit wildlife trade and supply chains across the heterogeneous context within which they occur. By integrating more diverse scientific disciplines, and their respective scientists with indigenous people and local community insight and risk assessment data, we can help promote a more sustainable and equitable wildlife trade.