BACKGROUND Interventions to treat mental disorders after natural disasters are important both for humanitarian reasons and also for successful post-disaster physical reconstruction that depends on the psychological functioning of the affected population. A major difficulty in developing such interventions, however, is that large between-disaster variation exists in the prevalence of post-disast...

Papers summarizing "Human and Economic Impacts of Weather Events" published each year in the WMO Bulletin by S. G. Cornford [1] have shown growing importance of weatherrelated disasters within world community. Such papers are a good summary of the events, especially with respect to human and property losses related to different seasons and continents Since 1994 year when “Guidelines for Natural...

BACKGROUND Disaster-related concerns by sub-populations have not been clarified after the great East Japan earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear power plant incidents. This paper assesses who was concerned about radiation, food safety, and natural disasters among the general population in order to buffer such concerns effectively. METHODS The hypothesis that women, parents, and family caregive...

Social media provides a digital space – a meeting place, for different people, often representing one or more groups in a society. The use of this space during a disaster, especially where information needs are high and the availability of factually accurate and ethically sourced data is scarce, has increased substantially over the last 5-10 years. This paper attempts to address communication i...

This paper introduces the overall structure of an integrated earthquake disaster simulation system which is being developed under five year Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas supported by the MEXT of Japan. This project aims to connect in a unity more than a dozen of simulators for individual natural phenomena and human activities involved in a big urban earthquak...

BACKGROUND A number of studies have shown a range of negative psychological symptoms (e.g. depression) after exposure to natural disasters. The aim of this study was to determine risk factors for depression in both children and adults who have survived natural disasters. METHODS Four electronic databases (PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and PsychInfo) were used to search for observational stu...

To the Editor: On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by a magnitude 9.0 Mw earthquake. The results were severe, as more than 15,000 people were killed by the earthquake and the following tsunami.1 The aftermath of the disaster was a level 7 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, matching only the Chernobyl disaster.1,2 However, a recent report of the World Health Organization showed that, to date, no dea...