Lightning is persistently one of the leading causes of death caused by environmental or natural disaster. To understand the pathophysiology and treatment of lightning injuries one must first discount the innumerable myths, superstitions, and misconceptions surrounding lightning. The fundamental difference between high voltage electrical injury and lightning is the duration of exposure to curren...

Five months after a tornado devastated a rural community in eastern North Carolina, the authors surveyed the mental health status of 116 disaster victims, using the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL) expanded to include most of DSM-III criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A total of 69 (59%) victims met the criteria for acute PTSD, 19 of whom had a severe form. Although an inadequat...

Architecture designs should accommodate earthquakes, urban design in populous areas should consider the need to prevent the spread of fires, and resettlement sites for victims of tsunami disasters should be sufficiently removed from the ocean to avoid future tsunami disasters. Although spatial design is an essential component of disaster management, the interrelationships between these fields h...

Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government transfers, such as unemployment insurance and public medical payments, in affected counties in the decade after a hurricane. The present value of t...

The frequency of national and international disaster events, increased media attention, and regulatory changes have all contributed to an improved public awareness of the vital role hospitals play in a crisis. Although hospital disaster preparedness efforts have matured dramatically since the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks, much work still remains to prepare all hospitals for potential p...

» Comorbidity of PTSD, major depression, and substance use disorder among adolescent victims » The role of anger and ongoing stressors in mental health following a natural disaster » Post-traumatic stress disorder and depression prevalence and associated risk factors among local disaster relief and reconstruction workers fourteen months after the Great East Japan earthquake: A cross-sectional s...

Infants and children are common victims of disaster or mass casualty situations. Prehospital providers provide the initial care and stabilization at the scene of a mass casualty event. There are a number of challenges the prehospital provider faces when caring for children in a mass casualty event, among them are the following: the physiology of children differs from adults, children are partic...

The psychological aftermath of disaster causes significant long-term psychiatric disability and suffering to victims and rescuers alike. This paper examines the effectiveness of psychological debriefing (PD), an early intervention that is widely used and claimed to reduce long-term psychiatric morbidity in the wake of disaster. Numerous factors hamper the design of methodologically sound resear...