This paper summarizes the impact that wars had on the history of nephrology, both worldwide and in the Ghent Medical Faculty notably on the definition, research and clinical aspects of acute kidney injury. The paper briefly describes the role of 'trench nephritis' as observed both during World War I and II, supporting the hypothesis that many of the clinical cases could have been due to Hantavi...

Lesson 1 Comprehensive assessment of needs, capacities and vulnerabilities is essential for appropriate targeting ........................................................................................ 5 Assessing urban needs ................................................................................................... 5 Targeting assistance ..................................................

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came to the conclusion that, worldwide the frequency and magnitude of all types of natural disasters are on the rise. Discernible changes in weather with a general increase in temperature (or a decrease in the number of cold days) have been observed in nearly all the land masses. There is also an increase in the frequency of heavy precipitati...

In this issue of Prehospital and Disaster Medicine, Clarke et al have given an insightful look into issues surrounding the needs of hospitals responding to chemically contaminated victims of mass-casualty incidents.1 In doing so, they also have provided an opportunity to examine more general concerns related to disasters. It is intuitive that hospitals play a major role in disaster response; th...

Regulatory disasters are catastrophic events or series of events which have significantly harmful impacts on the life, health or financial wellbeing of individuals or the environment. They are caused, at least in part, by failures in, or unforeseen consequences of, the design and /or operation of the regulatory system put in place to prevent those harmful effects from occurring. Regulatory disa...

with increasing frequency, the developing countries and the people living there are being affected by disasters. more and more often, development efforts are being destroyed. the reason for this trend is their growing vulnerability, which in turn is the result of economic and social development processes, such as the expansion of settlements and agricultural land in risk areas. the economic and...

TWENTY YEARS AGO, a paper in this journal listed 112 disasters that had occurred in Hawai'i prior to 1969, each of which was responsible for the loss of five or more lives. The list included tsunamis, storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanoes, explosions, fires, marine and air disasters (including many to ships and planes traveling to or from the Islands), railroad and motor vehicle ac...

A stochastic differential equation for a discontinuous Markov process is employed to model the magnitude of a population which grows logistically between disasters which are proportional to the current population size (density independent disasters). The expected persistence or extinction time satisfies a singular differential-difference equation. When the number of disasters, in the absence of...

The global investigation of disasters in recent years shows that their number has increased annually and the number of affected people and costs of disasters are increasing