BACKGROUND A serious life event is likely to shape attributions relating to symptoms experienced afterwards. While they may play an important role in prognosis and seeking care, such perceptions have hardly been studied among survivors of a disaster. OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between self-reported health problems that have been attributed to an extreme life event and the sympto...

BACKGROUND In 2003, the Task Force on Quality Control of Disaster Management (WADEM) published guidelines for evaluation and research on health disaster management and recommended the development of a uniform data reporting tool. Standardized and complete reporting of data related to disaster medical response activities will facilitate the interpretation of results, comparisons between medical ...

OBJECTIVES Female gender and young age are known risk factors for psychological morbidity after a disaster, but this conclusion is based on studies without a pre-disaster assessment. The aim of this study in family practice was to investigate if these supposed risk factors would still occur in a study design with a pre-disaster measurement. METHODS A matched cohort study with pre-disaster (on...

Changes in population birth outcomes, including increases in low birthweight or preterm births, have been documented after natural and manmade disasters. However, information is limited following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster. In this study, we assessed whether there were long-term changes in birth outcomes post-disaster, compared to pre-disaster data, and whether resi...

One of the main challenges of disaster management concerns to proper management of information. In more details, while most of the information required for disaster management has spatial component or location, current studies show that there are different problems with collection, dissemination, access and usage of spatial data/information for disaster management. The mentioned problems become...

The local public health agency (LPHA) workforce is at the center of the public health emergency preparedness system and is integral to locally driven disaster recovery efforts. Throughout the disaster recovery period, LPHAs have a primary responsibility for community health and are responsible for a large number of health services. In the face of decreasing preparedness funding and increasing f...

Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are em...

Few studies have compared the sensitivity of trauma questionnaires to disaster inventories for assessing the prevalence of exposure to natural disaster or associated risk for post-disaster psychopathology. The objective of this analysis was to compare reporting of disaster exposure on a trauma questionnaire (Brief Trauma Questionnaire [BTQ]) to an inventory of disaster experience. Between 2011 ...

This article presents evolutionary computation approach for increasing connectivity in disaster scenario. An effective disaster management requires rapid coordination of existing resources. At time of disaster, it becomes difficult to maintain Connectivity. Connectivity is considered to be of critical importance in disaster scenarios due to constrained and mobile conditions. In this paper we pr...

OBJECTIVES The objectives of the study were to develop and evaluate an "all-hazards" hospital disaster preparedness training course that utilizes a combination of classroom lectures, skills sessions, tabletop sessions, and disaster exercises to teach the principles of hospital disaster preparedness to hospital-based employees. METHODS Participants attended a two-day, 16-hour course, entitled ...