In disasters and mass casualty incidents (MCIs) paramedics initially determine the severeness of all patients' injuries during the so-called triage. In order to enhance disaster preparedness continuous training of all paramedics is indispensable. Due to the fact that large disaster control exercises are laborious and expensive, additional training on a small scale makes sense. Therefore we desi...

Dear Editor, Disasters may be natural (earth quakes, Tsunami), accidental (airline, train) or man-made (terrorist attacks, bombings).1 Iran ranks among countries suffering from the highest number of earthquake disasters.2 In Iran, dental professionals are considered as third degree team in disaster management.3 elementary team without the essential facilities, equipment or personnel for a total...

Hospitals play a central role in disasters by receiving an influx of casualties and coordinating medical efforts to manage resources. However, plans have not been fully developed in the event the hospital itself is severely damaged, either from natural disasters like earthquakes or tornados or manmade events such as a massive electrical failure or terrorist attacks. Of particular concern is the...

About 80% of older adults have at least one chronic condition that makes them more vulnerable than healthy people during a disaster. These chronic conditions - combined with the physiological, sensory, and cognitive changes experienced as part of aging - result in frail older adults having special needs during emergencies. Planning and coordination among public health and emergency preparedness...

During natural or man-made disasters, humanitarian response organizations look for useful information to support their decisionmaking processes. Social media platforms such as Twitter have been considered as a vital source of useful information for disaster response and management. Despite advances in natural language processing techniques, processing short and informal Twitter messages is a ch...

This paper describes a post-disaster mental health training program developed by the International Section of the Department of Psychiatry at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada) and delivered in Grenada after Hurricane Ivan struck the country in September 2004. This train-the-trainer program used an integrated community health model to help local health care providers develop the necessary s...

We examine the response to the recent natural disaster Hurricane Irene on Twitter.com. We collect over 65,000 Twitter messages relating to Hurricane Irene from August 18th to August 31st, 2011, and group them by location and gender. We train a sentiment classifier to categorize messages based on level of concern, and then use this classifier to investigate demographic differences. We report thr...

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors to monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, and pressure to cooperatively pass their data through the network to a main location. It provides a bridge between the real physical and virtual worlds. The more modern networks are bi-directional, also enabling control of sensor activ...