ESM Research

I’ll just put it out there – I’m a huge fan of nuclear power, and Dominion (our local power company) runs two reactor sites in our region, which generate 30% of their power output. This announcement came through a VA Dept of Emergency Management press release, and I thought it was a great example of public/private partnership in a readiness exercise:

Surry Radiological Emergency Preparedness Exercise Set for Aug. 4

RICHMOND, VA – Response personnel from state and local government and Dominion will demonstrate their ability to protect the public’s health and safety in a full-scale exercise Aug. 4 for the utility’s Surry Power Station. The exercise will involve localities within 10 miles of the power station.

The Virginia Department of Emergency Management will lead the Virginia Operations Plan Exercise, or VOPEX, a simulated radiological emergency, to help state and local governments test their response procedures in the unlikely event of a radiological emergency. These annual exercises rotate between the Surry and North Anna nuclear power stations.

Response agencies and local government representatives will role-play their emergency operations functions from the state and local government emergency operations centers. Participating localities include the counties of Charles City, Isle of Wight, James City, New Kent, Surry and York and the cities of Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson and Williamsburg.

Law enforcement personnel will practice traffic control measures in the field. Local and state radiological monitoring teams will take simulated field readings and communicate via radio.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will monitor the progress of the drill and conduct an in-depth analysis of the results, detailing areas needing improvement. FEMA will review the success of the exercise at a public meeting on Aug. 7 at 11 a.m. at the Omni Hotel in Newport News.

In addition, information about emergency plans at Surry and North Anna are available online. (You can also take a cute little animated tour here - anything to get the word out!)

A new issue of the International Journal of Emergency Management is out, and this article was an interesting example of studying behaviors in a non-emergency situation:

An experimental investigation of post-earthquake travel behaviours: the effects of severity and initial location

from Most recent issue published online for the International Journal of Emergency Management. by S. Lamb

An experimental investigation of post-earthquake travel behaviours: the effects of severity and initial location
D. Walton, S. Lamb
International Journal of Emergency Management, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2009) pp. 14 – 32
A computer-aided personal interviewing survey containing 63 items examining post-earthquake travel behaviours was administered to 802 members of the general public. Earthquake simulation videos modelled a moderate and severe event (6.8 and 7.5, respectively, on the Richter scale) in an office and home setting. Travel movements were recorded over a simulated 48-h period following the earthquake. Geographic Information System (GIS) software was used to obtain trip origins and destinations the routes taken and trip distances. Information seeking was also examined. The results indicate that an event which induces significant travel produces trips that are for a variety of purposes, not just to return home. While individually rational, this behaviour is a form of collective social disorder. Mode choice varied with event severity and distance (walking was preferred up to 3.25 km, then vehicles were preferred). Well-prepared emergency plans reduce the need to travel. The motivation to travel was affected by available information and is discussed as a form of information seeking.

For University of Richmond students and faculty, you can access this issue and previous issues of the International Journal of Emergency Management through Journal Locator. Type in the name of the journal, and then click the “Inderscience Enterprises Ltd” link (ignore the dates and any error messages that might pop up – we’re working on that). Let me know if you have any troubles.

When the power of Google is combined with the authority of the NLM, the CDC, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the DoD’s Global Emerging Infections System (among others), and the intellectual might of MIT and Harvard researchers, what you get is HealthMap.org:

HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Health issues in the new, ’2.0′ (for lack of a better term) technology-driven environment are an interesting thing, but not studied enough. I came across this article, from the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) via Pubmed:

HealthMap: global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports.

Freifeld CC, Mandl KD, Reis BY, Brownstein JS.

Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 300 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA. clark.freifeld@childrens.harvard.edu

OBJECTIVE: Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks. DESIGN: This report describes the design principles, software architecture and implementation of HealthMap and discusses key challenges and future plans. MEASUREMENTS: We describe the process by which HealthMap collects and integrates outbreak data from a variety of sources, including news media (e.g., Google News), expert-curated accounts (e.g., ProMED Mail), and validated official alerts. Through the use of text processing algorithms, the system classifies alerts by location and disease and then overlays them on an interactive geographic map. We measure the accuracy of the classification algorithms based on the level of human curation necessary to correct misclassifications, and examine geographic coverage. RESULTS: As part of the evaluation of the system, we analyzed 778 reports with HealthMap, representing 87 disease categories and 89 countries. The automated classifier performed with 84% accuracy, demonstrating significant usefulness in managing the large volume of information processed by the system. Accuracy for ProMED alerts is 91% compared to Google News reports at 81%, as ProMED messages follow a more regular structure. CONCLUSION: HealthMap is a useful free and open resource employing text-processing algorithms to identify important disease outbreak information through a user-friendly interface.

And this article, from PLoS Medicine:

Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project

John S Brownstein,^* Clark C Freifeld, Ben Y Reis, and Kenneth D Mandl

As developed nations continue to strengthen their electronic disease surveillance capacities [1], the parts of the world that are most vulnerable to emerging disease threats still lack essential public health information infrastructure [2,3]. The existing network of traditional surveillance efforts managed by health ministries, public health institutes, multinational agencies, and laboratory and institutional networks has wide gaps in geographic coverage and often suffers from poor and sometimes suppressed information flow across national borders [4]. At the same time, an enormous amount of valuable information about infectious diseases is found in Web-accessible information sources such as discussion sites, disease reporting networks, and news outlets [5,6,7]. These resources can support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts [8]. These data are plagued by a number of potential hazards that must be studied in depth, including false reports (mis- or disinformation) and reporting bias. Yet these data hold tremendous potential to initiate epidemiologic follow-up studies and provide complementary epidemic intelligence context to traditional surveillance sources. This potential is already being realized, as a majority of outbreak verifications currently conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network are triggered by reports from these nontraditional sources [5,6].

Because the field of Emergency Services Management is so new, diverse and inter-disciplinary, I employ a number of techniques to make ‘keeping up’ in the field manageable.* One of them is setting up “Journal Alerts” in databases for the journals that I know are most relevant to the field. This is an easy way to get the titles and abstracts delivered to my email inbox or RSS reader every time a new issue is published.

The journals that I try to read in this field are:

–International Journal of Emergency Management
–Journal of Emergency Management
–Natural Hazards Review
–Futures Research Quarterly
–Disaster Prevention and Management
–International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
–Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning
–Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

Over the course of the next few Thursdays, I’ll be reviewing these journals, and giving instructions for signing up for alerts for each. If you know of a journal the library should subscribe to in this field, let me know!

(*) If you think you have it bad with this subject, imagine how much reading I have to do to stay current in all the fields I support (ESM/Disaster Science, HRM, Information Systems, Liberal Arts, and Teacher Licensure) and my very own Library & Information Science field…

Thought some of you might be interested in this:

VEM Conference offers national and local perspectives
The 2009 Virginia Emergency Management Conference, set for March 31-April 3 in Hampton, will provide professional development, skills and knowledge of current emergency management techniques, and best practices. This year’s agenda is one of the strongest programs since the conference started more than 10 years ago. Attendees will hear from:

• National and state media representatives on coverage of the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy
• National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read on 2008’s hurricane season, the most damaging season since Katrina
• Emergency managers from northern Virginia on coordinating the most complex Presidential Inauguration ever
• A young woman who survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting with her inspiring story

The robust agenda offers much more, including speakers from Texas and Louisiana who’ll describe response to Hurricane Ike in light of lessons learned from Katrina and Rita, as well as emergency managers from Virginia who responded to the 2007 Virginia Tech tragedy.

 

Online registration and brochure are available at http://www.vemaweb.org. Special rates end March 1 for hotel accommodations at the Embassy Suites Hampton.

How’s that for a catchy title? The New Scientist magazine links to several different maps which look at the areas of the United States where residents are most likely to die from a natural disaster.

The most interesting thing about these maps, to me and others who have looked at them, is that severe heat kills more people than any other natural disaster cause, and it’s closely followed by winter weather. (Which means it’s not the headliners like hurricanes that are likely to get you, but the day-to-day things, and not being wise during those times of severe weather. Stepping off my soapbox now.) It’s also interesting that the data is broken down by county, which means studies can be done on why mortality rates can differ so significantly across a non-physical map line. (cf. the Chicago Heat Wave post I did last week.)

These maps are based on this article, “Spatial patterns of natural hazards mortality in the United States,” published in the open-access International Journal of Health Geographics, by two researchers from the University of South Carolina’s Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute.

I recently read this report, the first annual report on 9/11 Health, released by the World Trade Center Medical Working Group. It examines the overall effects of the 9/11 attacks on residents, responders and others. The report was part of the output of a New York city initiative called 9-11 Health.

“While the full scope of 9/11-related problems is unknown, a growing body of evidence suggests that significant health conditions have emerged that are associated with the disaster, in particular for those exposed during the collapse of the towers and those who participated substantially in rescue, recovery, and clean-up operations.This website has been developed to provide the latest scientific information to the public about 9/11-related health problems and to serve as a resource for people who have been affected.”

The website breaks down resources for individuals (“Responders”, “Children”, “Residents”), includes a complete report by the NYC health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, and links to the WTC Health Registry. The website provides a “News & Events” link, which may be the easiest way to view the wide range of studies done on the subject. Everything from headaches among registrees (an ongoing study) to the impact on behavior in preschool children from exposure to trauma such as the World Trade Center attacks are listed in the “Health Studies & Research” link. Altogether, the website has or links to any information you could want on the physical and mental health impacts of the terror attacks of Sept. 11th.