Natural disasters can cause significant numbers of severe, disabling injuries, resulting in a public health emergency and requiring foreign assistance. However, since medical rehabilitation services are often poorly developed in disaster-affected regions and not highly prioritized by responding teams, physical and rehabilitation medicine (PRM) has historically been underemphasized in global dis...

Definition Disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has three distinct but interrelated meanings. First, it is a goal that involves the restoration of normal community activities that were disrupted by disaster impacts – in most people’s minds, exactly as they were before the disaster struck. Second, it is a phase in the emergency management cycle that begins with stabilization of the disaster cond...

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the prevalence of newly-started drinkers and their continuing drinking behaviors after the Great East Japan earthquake. Moreover, the relationships between newly-started drinking and psychological factor, disaster-related experience, and perceived radiation risk were examined. We used data from 37,687 pre-disaster non-drinkers who participated in the...

To standardize the key building blocks of disaster health competency models (content, structure, and process), we recommend a reinterpretation of the research, development, test, and evaluation construct (RDT&E) as a novel organizing framework for creating and presenting disaster health competency models. This approach seeks to foster national alignment of disaster health competencies. For scop...

Climate change is real, and has a significant human component related to greenhouse gases, as summarized by the IPCC’s Working Group I. Nothing in this white paper contradicts this work. • Global disaster losses have increased. • The increase in disaster losses is primarily due to floods and storms. • Scientists have not yet attributed changes in floods and storms to human causes. However, ther...

China is prone to disasters and escalating disaster losses. Effective disaster mitigation is the foundation for efficient disaster response and rescue and for reducing the degree of hazardous impacts on the population. Vulnerability refers to the population's capacity to anticipate, cope with, and recover from the impact of a hazardous event. A hazard vulnerability assessment (HVA) systematical...

With the development of social networks, the mechanism of crowdsourcing is not limited to commercial application. In the event of disaster, information disseminated through social networks, and the mechanism of crowdsourcing thus is established. However, it is worth discussing whether the accuracy of the disaster information through the virtual community can be referred to the government agenci...

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...

The landmark Humanitarian Response Review, commissioned by the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2005, has catalyzed recent reforms in disaster response through the Inter-Agency Standing Committee. These reforms include a "cluster lead" approach to sectoral responsibilities and the strengthening of humanitarian coordination. Clinical medicine, public health, and disaster incident m...

BACKGROUND We aimed to quantify the health problems and to assess the possible risk factors for developing health problems in persons affected by the explosion of a firework depot at Enschede, The Netherlands, on May 13, 2000. The explosion considerably damaged buildings in the local neighbourhood and caused 22 immediate deaths and injuries in over 1000 people. METHODS A longitudinal study of...