Natural disasters including hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires often involve substantial physical and mental impacts on affected populations and thus are public health priorities. Limited research shows that vulnerable populations such as the low-income, socially isolated migrant and seasonal farmworkers (MSFW) are particularly susceptible to the effects of natural disasters....

Indonesia, geographically and geologically, is potentially encounter natural disasters. One of the tools used to early detect disaster is sensor of ocean waves change, but it has drawbacks including the time difference between information/warnings obtained with the disaster event is very short, less than 30 minutes. The faster detector is required, so the time difference will be longer. For exa...

Power-law relationships, relating events with magnitudes to their frequency, are common in natural disasters and violent conflict. Compared to many statistical distributions, power laws drop off more gradually, i.e. they have “fat tails”. Existing studies on natural disaster power laws are mostly confined to physical measurements, e.g., the Richter scale, and seldom cover casualty distributions...

Risk communication is an important vehicle for the scientific understanding of the perception of and response to various kinds of threats. The present study provides apparently the first empirical attempt to compare perceptions, decision-making, and anticipated action in response to threats of three kinds: natural disaster, violent crime, and terrorism. A total of 258 college undergraduates wer...

When a disaster occurs, it is for governments to provide the leadership, civil defense, security, evacuation, and public welfare. The medical aspects of a disaster account for less than 10% of resource and personnel expenditure. Hospitals and health care provider teams respond to unexpected occurrences such as explosions, earthquakes, floods, fires, war, or the outbreak of an infectious epidemi...

BACKGROUND Depressive symptoms have been recognized as one of the most frequent complaints among natural disaster survivors. One of the most frequently used self-report measures of depressive symptoms is the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). To our knowledge, no study has yet examined the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the CES-D in a sample of natural di...

The daily use of geospatial technology, such as the global positioning system (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), and remote sensing (RS), is increasing. The use of geospatial technology in disaster management is a natural fit because almost every aspect of a disaster is referenced by location. This paper presents the results of a recent web-based survey of disaster management practiti...

Understanding the performance of disaster monitoring systems is a key to understanding their success, therefore; various qualitative and quantitative measures and metrics can be applied in the characterization and analysis of such systems. Through evaluation studies, problems that impede a disaster monitoring system performance can be identified. The results can be used for system control, desi...

The importance of emergency response system has grown significantly in recent times due to the frequent manmade and natural disasters such as September 2001 and Hurricane Sandy 2012. Disaster, manmade and natural, causes great economic and human losses each year throughout the world. Transportation and Telecommunication play a crucial role in disaster response and management. Our previous work ...

As Editors-in-Chief, and on behalf of our distinguished Editorial Board, we are thrilled to welcome you to this inaugural issue of Disaster Health. Disaster Health is uniquely focused on the intersection of disaster mental and behavioral health and disaster public health. In this multi-disciplinary arena, scientific advances are accelerating. Disaster Health provides a mechanism for expeditious...