Disasters
kkrisberg | November 1, 2016Celeste Monforton and I are currently in Denver at the American Public Health Association's (APHA) 2016 Annual Meeting and Exposition — the year’s largest gathering of public health professionals. The meeting is packed with hundreds of scientific sessions, leading public health researchers and new findings on just about any public health topic you can imagine. Below are some highlights of the past few days, courtesy the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.
Trees don’t just make neighborhoods pretty. They can also save lives: With flowers in the spring, lush green leaves in the summer and changing colors…
sastyk | May 21, 2012These fragments I have shored against my ruins. - T. S. Eliot
The national news trucks hit my neighborhood last fall, as some of you will remember. When Tropical Storm Irene caused severe flooding and destruction in surrounding communities, and particularly to many of my neighbor's farms, we were briefly in the news. Then, as is normal for any community that has experienced disaster, came waves of volunteerism and assistance, and then a gradual diminishing of attention and interest, and the slow, long process of reclamation and rebuilding. As spring came around, the houses in the village…
revere | May 13, 2010BP has this great reputation for being an environmentally friendly and responsible company. I know it because their incessant television ads tell me it's true. The ones that flank the national news stories about their horrendous safety record of explosions and worker deaths or their catastrophic oil spills. Those ads. When something happens they start the noise machine and appear to be the innocent party let down by their lessee.
BP ("British Petroleum") is a British Company operating in the US. A US company operating in Britain is called Innospec. You probably never heard of them because…
revere | April 20, 2010The Icelandic volcanic eruption is still causing havoc in Europe with ripple effects elsewhere as people and planes are grounded for travel in or out of much of northern Europe. Pressure from the traveling public, air carriers and business is mounting to let passenger and cargo planes fly again. What's changed? Not much. There's about as much uncertainty as there was a week ago, just a lot more pushback. The recriminations are already starting: EU and national transport authorities "over reacted." They should have ... done what? At the same time airlines like Air France-KLM are conducting…
gregladen | February 25, 2009When will the madness end? When the Republicans dry up and blow away, of course.
In the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union 2.0 address, by Bobby Jindal, governer of Louisiana, we heard this:
"Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.,"
The reason why volcanoes have been picked out of some speech writer's anal sphincter zone is because they erupt and they wanted the metaphor. Or because Jindal believes he has no volcanoes in his state (but he would be wrong) or because of some other rhetorical reason…
revere | February 6, 2009For reasons other than this blog (I actually have a real life) I was reading a 1965 text by Leavell and Clark, Preventive Medicine for the doctor in his community: an epidemiologic approach, and found this on pp. 67-68 regarding tasks in a disease outbreak:
"Further spread must be prevented; the sick must be cared for, hospitalization must be provided, if necessary; the population must be told how to protect itself; inoculations may be required; and particular attention to the safeguarding of water, milk, and food supplies may be essential."
Concise and to the point. I wonder how much…
revere | December 13, 2008Whether they are called the White House Press Secretary or the regime's Information Minister, they seem to have in common one characteristic: they are professional liars. It goes without saying that all of Bush's press secretaries have been blatant liars, but it's also true of Clinton's and virtually very one of their predecessors. Some of them have been much more likable than others and when they lied made my hackles rise less, but they were still professional liars and why anyone believes what they say is one of the big mysteries. I have to keep reminding myself that our "Information…
revere | December 2, 2008Cholera is a vicious disease. It can take a healthy person and kill him or her in a day by rapidly dehydrating them from a massive, watery diarrhea. The resulting electrolyte imbalance can lead to vascular collapse or cardiac arrest. Cholera is usually spread by fecally contaminated drinking water, and hence is completely preventable. It is also easily treatable by keeping the patient hydrated with the oral rehydration therapy, basically minimally fortified water. Yet this preventable and treatable disease is now epidemic in the country of Zimbabwe. Government sources admit to over 400 deaths…
revere | October 15, 2008I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…
revere | July 23, 2008Hurricane season is upon us (Hello, Dolly), so it's time to drag out the still heaving corpse of Hurricane Katrina. There was always this weird mismatch between Bush administration tales of how much aid was going to the victims and the pictures of forlorn, unaided and then outraged victims. Given the huge amount of federal aid, some may have thought that ungrateful. But what was "given" can be taken away by just moving a few decimal points:
Federal officials vastly overestimated the value of hurricane relief supplies given away earlier this year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency…
revere | May 19, 2008It seems with every terrible natural disaster we have to say the same thing. Dead bodies aren't a public health risk:
Contrary to popular belief, dead bodies left from natural disasters such as the China earthquake and Myanmar cyclone are not a source of disease or a health threat to survivors, the World Health Organization said Friday.
[snip]
"There is a widespread and erroneous belief that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue," [Arturo Pesigan, WHO's Western Pacific Region's headquarters in Manila] said.
"There has never been a…
purepedantry | October 24, 2007California wildfires continue to blaze, but this caught my eye:
Almost 200 square miles of California, including nearly 700 homes burned since the last official measure. But far fewer homes are threatened and more emergency personnel have arrived.
Here are the key figures from California's emergency management office (pdf):
Burned: 666 square miles; 1,436 homes
Threatened: 25,925 homes, 2,055 commercial structures.
Emergency personnel: 8,884 (Emphasis mine.)
The Dark Lord Beelzebub's role in starting the CA fires isn't proven, but I have my suspicions.
Anyway, the Lede has the fires story…