Today’s RGHA blog post is inspired by last week’s series of natural disasters in the Richmond area, including last Tuesday’s 5.9 earthquake and last Saturday’s Hurricane Irene. Although the earthquake caused minimal damage, Irene left thousands of people in the Richmond area without adequate water and power supply. According to the Washington Post, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell predicted that damages to the state would total millions of dollars. Before, during, and after the hurricane, the Virginia Department of health worked (and is still working) tirelessly to minimize the health risks to the public brought on by the disaster, including adequate shelter, food supply, clean water, and ability to communicate with emergency personnel (to name a few).
For all intents and purposes, last week’s natural disasters hit a population that possesses relatively organized public programs for health, safety, and communication. Still, it made a giant impact in thousands of lives and created wide-spread, multi-faceted public health concerns throughout the area. Throughout the world, even in communities with structured public influence— let alone those that are underserved—natural disasters have the ability to create sheer public health chaos.
How can and should we, as practitioners of global public health, work to minimize the risks and damages to populations throughout the world brought on by nature’s wrath? What is our role, in the private sector, to promote and uphold health and safety for communities affected by natural disasters? Certainly these questions present daunting challenges and tremendous tasks for any organization to take on. In fact, private organizations exist solely based on the premise of providing education, prevention, and relief to communities affected by natural disasters (WANDAA, Relief International, Global Education). But what can a general global health organization, like us, do to uphold public health in an effective and efficient way in the face of a natural disaster?
Share your opinion with us. Here are some articles about Hurricane Irene in our neck of the woods and the general effect of natural disasters on public health. Also, feel free to leave comments linking us to more articles that discuss this broad topic.
Washington Post: Obama grants request for federal aid in Virginia for Irene damage
The threat of communicable diseases following natural disasters: a public health response
Protecting the Public's Health
I think that a lot of the work that people in the public health field have to do in the face of a natural disaster involves effective management in shelters or any other place where there is an unusually dense population of people-- simple and coordinated methods of surveillance for obvious symptoms of communicable disease, having vaccines and potable water on hand, and even preparing to take care of people with chronic disease. Most definitely easier said than done, but I think that this type of managerial preparedness can prevent disease from running rampant in a population under these unusual circumstances.
ReplyDeleteI found an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Hurricane Katrina and how unprepared we really were in terms of preserving public health: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp058238
The CDC's plan to fight against a zombie apocolypse...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bt.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
Good to see government with a sense of humor!