OBJECTIVE Paresthesias can result from metabolic disorders, nerve entrapment following repetitive motions, hyperventilation pursuant to anxiety, or exposure to neurotoxins. We analyzed data from community members exposed to the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster of September 11, 2001, to evaluate whether exposure to the disaster was associated with paresthesias. METHODS Analysis of data from 3...

Fire disaster is the major factor to endanger the public and environmental safety. People lost their life during fire disaster mainly be attributed to the dense smoke and toxic gas under combustion, which hinder the escape of people and the rescue of firefighters under fire disaster. The smoke suppression effect of several transitional metals oxide on the epoxy resin treated with intumescent fl...

The Aral Sea area in Central Asia has been encountering one of the world's greatest environmental disasters for more than 15 years. During that time, despite many assessments and millions of dollars spent by large, multinational organizations, little has changed. The 5 million people living in this neglected and virtually unknown part of the world are suffering not only from an environmental ca...

INTRODUCTION This report addresses the development, implementation, and evaluation of a protocol designed to protect participants from inadvertent emotional harm or further emotional trauma due to their participation in the World Trade Center Evacuation (WTCE) Study research project. This project was designed to identify the individual, organizational, and structural (environmental) factors ass...

Recent perspectives in anthropological research define a disaster as a process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of vulnerability. From this basic understanding three general topical areas have developed: (a) a behavioral and organizational ...

Small disasters are usually the product of climate variability and climate change. Analysis of them illustrates that they increase difficulties for local development-frequently affecting the livelihoods of poor people and perpetuating their level of poverty and human insecurity-and entail challenges for a country's development. In contrast to extreme events, small disasters are often invisible ...

In this paper we overview the ongoing research into the application of case-based reasoning in emergency management, based on which we propose a new approach for representation of large-scale disaster cases. The approach takes the environmental factors into account, and the case is organized according to key scenes, rather than disaster types. Each scene consists of inherent attributes, which a...

The South East Asian Tsunami in Thailand and Hurricane Katrina in the United States were natural disasters of different origin but of similar destruction and response. Both disasters exhibited synonymous health outcomes and similar structural damage from large surges of water, waves, and flooding. A systematic discussion and comparison of the disasters in Thailand and the Gulf Coast considers b...