Here’s an amazing find, thanks to those good folks at the US Fire Administration Library. 290 titles are included so far, with topics ranging from technical reports on investigations of specific fires, to public education, to training manuals for firefighters and educational material for administrators. Technical overviews, such as “Fire in the United States: 1986-1995“, transcripts from Congressional hearings and special reports and analysis are also included, making this resource indispensable for researchers. Like anything from Google, it’s easy to search, either within individual titles or the entire collection; someone has also very helpfully organized the titles into a few specific subjects, such as arson, fire prevention, etc.

With U of R alumni (and former “Leader-in-Residence” at the Jepson School) Leland Melvin serving as a mission specialist on this shuttle flight, I couldn’t help but mention NASA’s great online database of hurricane and typhoon images and information. With everything from current storm outlooks to educator resources to 3-D views of historic storms, it’s a fantastic resource.

(far left) Spider Leland Melvin

CQ Researcher (available to the U of R community through Boatwright Memorial Library), offers a number of reports on topics dealing with the flu, including vaccine safety, emergency medicine, combating infectious diseases and, perhaps most relevant, one entitled, “Avian Flu Threat: Are we prepared for the next pandemic?” These reports are incredibly in-depth, giving the background, current situation and future outlook, as well as a bibliography, maps and charts, a chronology for the issue, and even contacts – people and groups who are SME’s on the material in question. My favorite part of a CQ Report, however, has to be the “Pro/Con” section, in which a question is asked relating to the topic. Two experts in the field, either from their testimony before Congress or in an essay written specifically for CQ, give their answer to the question. In the Avian Flu Threat report, for example, the question was, “Is there a serious risk of a human pandemic of avian flu?” The testimony of Michael T. Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota before the House Committee on International Relations answers the “pro” side of the question; Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute, writing expressly for CQ, answered the “con” side.

Another resource, similarly aimed at giving background information to journalists, is the Nieman Center for Journalism at Harvard. Their “Covering Pandemic Flu” page offers a treasure trove of information. There’s an introduction, which includes the definition and etymology of the word “pandemic”, and an overview of the science behind the hype; pandemic preparedness at multiple levels, from individual to global; essays on the press coverage of flu, from veteran reporters in various countries; crisis communications information from Communications Directors at WHO and CDC; and finally, a history, glossary and bibliography of pandemic influenza. All the information has been developed and vetted by the Nieman Foundation, although links to other relevant material are offered.

DISASTER RECOVERY
Experiences from Past Disasters Offer Insights for Effective Collaboration after Catastrophic Events

Highlights of GAO-09-811, a report to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate

In the wake of the 2005 Gulf Coast Hurricanes, coordination and collaboration challenges created obstacles during the government’s response and recovery efforts. Because of the many stakeholders involved in recovery, including all levels of government, it is critical to build collaborative relationships. Building on GAO’s September 2008 report which provided several key recovery practices from past  catastrophic disasters, this report presents examples of how federal, state, and local governments have effectively collaborated in the past. GAO reviewed five catastrophic disasters—the Loma Prieta  earthquake (California, 1989), Hurricane Andrew (Florida, 1992), the Northridge earthquake (California, 1994), the Kobe earthquake (Japan, 1995), and the Grand Forks/Red River flood (North Dakota and Minnesota, 1997)—to identify recovery lessons. GAO interviewed officials involved in the recovery from these disasters and experts on disaster recovery. GAO also reviewed relevant legislation, policies, and the disaster recovery literature.

What GAO Recommends
GAO recommends the Secretary of Homeland Security direct the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) to create a mechanism focused on sharing information and lessons learned regarding disaster recovery, including good collaborative practices. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with our recommendation.

The idea of looking for ‘lessons learned’ across a different types of disasters struck me as interesting. We tend to see research done on the after-effects of hurricanes, for example, but why shouldn’t there be lessons for emergency planners in all types of disaster recoveries?

Take H1N1, for instance. What is the best way to quickly disseminate authoritative information about the disease? PLoS (Public Library of Science), a leader in open-access, peer-reviewed publishing, to the rescue!

“PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.”

While the postings are not subject to the same rigorous peer-review process as formally published scientific journals use, “inappropriate” submissions are being screened out by two experts in the fields of microbiology and infectious disease. While many of the articles listed are focused specifically on the biology of the virus, other topics can be found here as well, such as “Swine origin influenza A (H1N1) virus and ICU capacity in the US: Are we prepared?” and “Reducing influenza spreading over the airline network“, which uses different models to determine the most effective method for containing the spread of disease through air travel.

The National Library of Medicine maintains a collection of more than 30 environmental health websites under the auspices of the Environmental Health and Toxicology SIS (Specialized Information Services). Topics covered range from the specific (Health effects from the collapse of the World Trade Center) to the general (Tornadoes).  The links contained within each page vary, but most begin with a set of ‘Overview’ links, all from US Government sites, and then may go on to include links to glossaries, data and research sites, and law and policy. Almost all include links to specialized research from the National Library of Medicine’s databases, such as Pubmed, Toxline, Hazardous Substances Data Bank, ChemID Plus, Household Products Database, Tox Town and Medline Plus.

While we’re on the topic of open-source public health items, this special supplement to the AMA’s journal “Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness” (June 2009, Vol. 3) is freely available online. Article topics range from public policy (“National Strategy for Health Care System Preparedness”) to  Business Continuity (“Importance of Business Continuity in Health Care”) to NIMS (“Review of Hospital Preparedness Incidents to National Incident Management System Compliance”).

If you are interested in this topic and are a member of the University of Richmond community, you might want to check out our other Disaster Medicine journals, including the International Journal of Disaster Medicine, the Internet Journal of Rescue and Disaster Medicine, and Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. As always, let me know if you have any troubles viewing the links, or want to do a more refined search for a topic in this area.

Here’s a summary:

• Scientific American mainly sums up blog entries from the “60 Second Science” blog. But there’s also a detailed interview transcript with Dr. Chris Olsen, Director of the Olsen Laboratory, a veterinary medicine lab in Wisconsin where Influenza ‘A’ viruses are studied, and a link to the April 2009 cover story called, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic” that describes the work of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative.

• The New England Journal of Medicine is, of course, a fantastic authoritative source in medical research, and their H1N1 page contains many interesting articles, including “Managing and Reducing Uncertainty in an Emerging Influenza Pandemic”, which honestly asserts the fact that pandemic control must begin when the spread and fatality of the disease are unknown. Editorials and “Perspective” articles, with titles such as, “Digital Disease Detection – Harnessing the Web for Public Health Surveillance” flesh out (no pun intended) the hard-core science articles.

• The Lancet (a British medical journal) has also opened their pages:

“The Lancet’s H1N1 Resource Centre is the result of a collaborative effort by the editors of over 40 Elsevier-published journals and 11 learned societies who have agreed to make freely available on this site any relevant content. All papers have been selected by a Lancet editor, grouped by topic and fulltext pdfs made available to download free of charge.”

(If you haven’t seen an Elsevier price quote, you can’t appreciate the magnitude of this – Elsevier articles are notoriously expensive.)

• Finally, the NLM/NIH Environmental Health and Toxicology page is a wonderful compendium of all things related to H1N1. Among other resources, they link to 8 different National Academies Press titles, and the fulltext of the 1978 Institute of Medicine (also National Academies) book “The swine flu affair: decision-making on a slippery disease“.

Gov. Tim Kaine has approved the Commonwealth of Virginia Emergency Operations Plan Pandemic Influenza Incident Annex VI, now available at http://www.vaemergency.com/library/plans/index.cfm. The annex represents nearly two years of collaboration with many state agencies and provides guidance for non-medical response operations in Virginia to a pandemic influenza event.

News release

Free access to world-renowned public health database to assist swine-flu effort

1 May 2009

CABI today has announced free access to its specialist Global Health database – the definitive database for public health information – www.cabdirect.org/globalhealth

Simultaneously CABI has developed a Swine flu ‘dashboard’ that brings together up-to-the-minute information on the virus (http://www.netvibes.com/cabialerts).The ‘dashboard’ includes resources from CABI and critical advice from key health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

“Our mission is to help people worldwide through the provision of scientific knowledge,” said Dr Trevor Nicholls, CEO of CABI. “Today we are offering our most applicable resource, over the coming weeks, to help health professionals and others working on the front line.”

In a fast changing sequence of events that has led to the rapid escalation of concern from WHO, and the reaction of national governments in considering their response to a possible influenza pandemic, release of the database is designed to give urgently needed support to those who need it most: scientists, medical professionals and health authorities investigating the causes and treatments of the disease and linkages to past outbreaks.

Influenza researchers urgently need to be able to refer back to previous scientific work in this area to understand the behaviour of previous strains of the virus and to research effective mechanisms for handling earlier outbreaks.

The Global Health database brings together global knowledge on every aspect of influenza since 1910. The knowledge it contains could provide a key weapon in health researchers’ response in understanding and controlling the virus.

Much of the data in Global Health is derived from publications that have long since vanished. They tell us a great deal about past pandemics, from rates and patterns of transmission, duration, timing of epidemiological peaks, geographical distribution of the disease, government preparedness and quarantine provisions through to effects on different age and social groups, severity in developing versus developed countries, symptoms, causes of mortality (secondary problems, especially pneumonia, were devastating in the Spanish flu) and mortality rates.

By opening the door to a wealth of historical information on past pandemics, the Global Health database has the potential to reveal vital clues in the international fight against swine flu (influenza A – H1N1).

CABI Swine Flu Dashboard – www.cabdirect.org/globalhealth

Global Health database – http://www.netvibes.com/cabialerts

Media contact: Sarah Wilson, PR and Corporate Communications Manager, tel: +44 (0) 1491 829 361, mob: +44 (0) 7516 928 845, email: s.wilson@cabi.org

Editor’s notes

About CABI

CABI is a not-for-profit science-based development and information organization. Its mission and direction are influenced by member countries that help guide the activities undertaken. These include publishing; development projects and research; and microbial services. CABI produces key scientific information, including CAB Abstracts – the world-renowned bibliographic database covering agriculture and the environment. CABI also publishes multimedia compendia, books, e-books and full text internet resources aiming to further science and its application to real life. Our expertise includes animal and veterinary sciences, entomology, plant sciences, environmental sciences, human health, parasitology, mycology, crop protection, rural economics, rural development and leisure and tourism. For more information go to www.cabi.org

About the Global Health database

The Global Health database is published by CABI which has recorded public health and veterinary research since 1910. Global Health is the only specialist bibliographic abstracting and indexing database dedicated to public health research and practice. With more than two million records, Global Health is the definitive international public health database for academics, researchers, NGOs, policy makers, clinicians, healthcare professionals and students. The database covers all pathogens relevant to human health, including swine flu.

Once I have a minute, I’ll do some looking and see what’s there, but it looks interesting, and potentially very useful.