CONTEXT On May 12(th) 2008, a devastating earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale, struck Wenchuan county and surrounding areas in China. The prevalence of mental illness among children and adolescents in a rural town far from the earthquake epicenter is unknown. OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression among junior middle school students...

introduction: worldwide, every year, many people undergo spinal cord injury which is of the worst health problems and is followed by several secondary complications. today, more than half of the world population is in danger of natural disasters such as earthquake, which is one of the causes of spinal cord injuries outbreak. earthquake in bam also caused many spinal cord injured people for whom...

In aiming to decrease the number of casualties and people with difficulty in wide-area evacuations due to a large earthquake, it is highly important to visualize and quantify the potential danger in residential areas. In this paper, we construct a multi-agent simulation model, which describes property damage (such as building-collapse, the spread of fire and blocking of streets) and people’s ev...

Masonry dwellings and small commercial buildings are located in areas as diverse as Adelaide, Australia, Wellington, New Zealand, and Memphis, Tennessee. The number of these masonry buildings and their design presents a danger to the human population and a potential economic loss when they are subjected to an earthquake. The dwellings of interest are constructed from unreinforced masonry. They ...

This article uses grounded theory methods to research the history of a therapeutic community and highlights the possibilities of ‘being able to learn’ as an aim for history of medicine research. For this case study, processes of research and learning allow consideration of the ‘dilemma of paternalism’ and the interaction between history, policy and practice. How can students enter into discours...

BACKGROUND The association between ages and psychological impact of natural disasters has not been well characterized. A population-based study was conducted 15 months after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to assess whether elderly survivors were more likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and general psychiatric morbidity. METHODS A population-based survey of 327 survivors (152 e...

[1] The 26 December 2004 Sumatra earthquake (Mw 9.2–9.3) generated the most deadly tsunami in history. Yet within the first hour, the true danger of a major oceanwide tsunami was not indicated by seismic magnitude estimates, which were far too low (Mw 8.0–8.5). This problem relates to the inherent saturation of early seismicwave methods. Here we show that the earthquake’s true size and tsunami ...

After the Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008, a huge amount of loose deposits was generated mountain surface in zone, and vegetation severely damaged, providing rich source material for debris flow, greatly increasing danger. For many years, researchers have mainly considered recovery slope assessing risk flow post-earthquake. However, field investigations found that large amounts dynamic reser...