The field of disaster management in South Africa has developed dramatically over the past seven years. The paradigm shift from civil protection to disaster risk management brought with it the realisation that the nianagemeni of disaster risk is paramount to reducing successfully the vulnerability of these communities mo.st at risk. The resilience and coping mechanisms of communities affected by...

OBJECTIVE We sought to examine the legal and ethical implications of workplace health risk reduction programs (HRRPs) using health risk assessments, individually focused risk reduction, and financial incentives to promote compliance. METHODS We conducted a literature review, analyzed relevant statutes and regulations, and considered the effects of these programs on employee health privacy. ...

It is difficult to know how many fatalities and injuries in an earthquake may have been avoided by a mitigating action because the result without the mitigation can usually not be estimated with a useful reliability. The case of the evacuation before the 1975, M 7.3, Haicheng earthquake offers a rare opportunity to quantitatively estimate the number of casualties saved. We show that the compute...

BACKGROUND Cancer is a shared family experience that might provide an opportunity for lifestyle change among at-risk family members. The purpose of this study was to assess receptivity and preferences for cancer risk reduction programs among at-risk family members with two or more relatives affected with pancreas cancer. METHODS We surveyed 401 at-risk family members in an existing pancreatic...

Army STARRS is the largest and most comprehensive research project of mental health ever conducted in the U.S. Army. The project was designed to examine a broad range of risk and resilience (protective) factors across a complex set of outcomes. Army STARRS scientists created a series of extensive databases with the potential to achieve groundbreaking results. These databases will allow scientis...

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Governments in developing countries spend money on goods and services that have an impact on people’s exposure to risk. This paper presents a simple approach to valuing such expenditures from the perspective of risk reduction. There are two types of expenditures: public provision of insurance, such as for health care or crop yields; and policies aimed at other objectives that change peoples’ ri...

BACKGROUND The relatively high incidence of cervical cancer in women at older ages is a continuing concern in countries with long-established cervical screening. Controversy remains on when and how to cease screening. Existing population-based studies on the effectiveness of cervical screening at older ages have not considered women's screening history. We performed a nationwide cohort study to...

Using a standard reduction argument based on conditional expectations, this paper argues that risk sharing is always beneficial (with respect to convex order or second degree stochastic dominance) provided the risk-averse agents share the total losses appropriately (whatever the distribution of the losses, their correlation structure and individual degrees of risk aversion). Specifically, all a...

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To determine whether use of a risk assessment scale reduces nosocomial pressure ulcers. BACKGROUND There is contradictory evidence concerning the validity of risk assessment scales. The interaction of education, clinical judgement and use of risk assessment scales has not been fully explored. It is not known which of these is most important, nor whether combining them resu...