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Overview of Incidents Involving Mass Casualty Weapons
Introduction
Mass-casualty incidents(MCIs) are events that generate sufficiently high numbers of casualties to overwhelm available medical resources. They include natural disasters (eg, hurricanes) and several types of intentional and unintentional man-made events, including transportation disasters, releases of dangerous substances, explosions, and mass shootings. Mass-casualty weapons(MCWs) are weapons capable of producing mass-casualty incidents. They include a variety of Chemicals Toxins Biological (infectious) agents Radiation sources Explosives The weapon types are sometimes referred to as CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, explosive) or NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical). The effects of MCW agents can be local (at or near the site of exposure) or systemic (because of absorption and distribution in the circulation). Mass-casualty weapons are sometimes termed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but this term is less appropriate because it implies significant physical destruction of infrastructure, which occurs only with explosive MCWs. Also, although "weapon" signifies intentional use (eg, by warring states or terrorists), most MCWs have unintentional equivalents (eg, an industrial or transportation leak of a toxic or radioactive substance, an infectious disease outbreak, or an industrial explosion) for which the basic principles and response are the same. 