Disasters
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After a disaster, the media typically focus on who is to blame. However, relatively little is known about how the narrative of blame plays out in media coverage of the release of official disaster reports. ⋯ Given the absence of blame in the Final Report, the newspapers resorted to the frame of 'failure' in news and feature articles, while continuing to raise questions in editorials and opinion pieces about who was to blame. This study argues that situating coverage of the report within the news frame of failure and questioning who was to blame for the disaster limited the media's ability to facilitate a discussion about the prevention of similar disasters in the future.
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In recent years, protracted crises and fragile post-conflict settings have challenged the co-existence, and even the linear continuum, of relief and development aid. Forced migration has tested humanitarian and development paradigms where sudden-onset emergencies, violence and displacement arise alongside ongoing development work. Drawing on Médecins Sans Frontières interventions in the region from December 2010 to May 2011, this paper examines aid and healthcare responses to displacement in Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia; it focuses on challenges to the maintenance of preparedness for such foreseeable emergencies and to adaptation in response to changing situations of displacement and insecurity. This 'backsliding' from development to emergency remains a substantial challenge to aid; yet, in exactly such cases, it also presents the opportunity to ensure access to medical care that is much more urgently needed in times of crisis, including the suspension of user fees for medical care.
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Growing evidence indicates the adverse psychological and welfare consequences of nuclear power accidents particularly among parents of small children. However, little has been published about the public health experiences of and practical countermeasures to deal with such consequences for parents of small children in the aftermath of disasters. Based on our past research efforts to develop parenting support programmes in Fukushima City, we describe here the discussions and resulting strategies that developed from collaborative efforts between university researchers and public health nurses after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake. The processes presented here may be useful to improve national and international preparedness to protect the health of parents and children in future nuclear disasters.
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Bangladesh is one of the poorest and the most disaster-prone countries in Asia; it is important, therefore, to know how its disaster reduction strategies are organised and planned. Cyclone shelters comprise a widely acceptable form of infrastructural support for disaster management in Bangladesh. ⋯ The results reveal that the establishment of cyclone shelters in the studied communities is determined by neither a right-based nor a demand-based planning approach; rather, their creation is dependent on the socio-political affluence of local-level decision-makers. The paper goes on to demonstrate that socially vulnerable households (defined, for example, by income or housing conditions) are afforded disproportionately less access to cyclone shelters as compared to less socially vulnerable households.
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Hazard vulnerability analysis (HVA) is used to risk-stratify potential threats, measure the probability of those threats, and guide disaster preparedness. The primary objective of this project was to analyse the level of disaster preparedness in public hospitals in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, utilising the HVA tool in collaboration with the Disaster Medicine Section at Harvard Medical School. ⋯ With this project, HVAs were conducted successfully for the first time in health care facilities in Abu Dhabi. This study thus serves as another successful example of multidisciplinary emergency preparedness processes.