Newswise — DEADLY DRINKING WATER: The biggest concern besides drowning is desperate people resorting to drinking and eating contaminated food and water, said Roger Lewis, Ph.D., director of the Saint Louis University School of Public Health's Environmental Health Research Lab. Waterborne diseases spread by fecal material are also a huge concern, and they can be fatal to the young, the elderly and anyone with compromised immune systems, said Dr. Lewis, who compares the hurricane's devastation to mass refugee situations he's witnessed in Third-World countries. "The amount of mold there after this will be staggering. Homes will have to be bulldozed, and even superstructures may have to be gutted. It will take years before the city in any way, shape or form returns to a semblance of normalcy." Dr. Lewis attended Tulane University in New Orleans and is familiar with the city.
IS BAD PLANNING TO BLAME?: Joanne Langan, Ph.D., is co-author of a book on preparing nurses to handle the aftermath of a disaster and a nurse who lived though a Gulf Coast hurricane 20 years ago, says disaster planners did everything they could to prepare, but the effects of the hurricane and subsequent flooding were too immense to predict. "It just overwhelmed any kind of system they had in place. They had mandatory evacuation, and people still didn't leave," she said. Langan is an assistant professor of public health nursing at Saint Louis University who helped design a distance learning course to teach nurses across the country about their unique responsibilities when disaster strikes.
KATRINA NO SURPRISE: Two years ago, Timothy Kusky, Ph.D., professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences, predicted the flooding and devastation for the Deep South that a hurricane of Katrina's magnitude would bring. "If the hurricane is powerful enough to add flooding rains to areas upriver of New Orleans, the course of the Mississippi River could be changed," he wrote then. "The Mississippi has switched courses many times over the past several thousand years." Kusky is the author of the 2003 book Geological Hazards.
IMPACT ON CHILDREN: The devastation of the hurricane and floods in the Gulf Coast are troubling for adults, but potentially more terrifying for children, said Ken Haller, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University. "Parents need to be judicious about how much they're going to let their kids watch this on TV. It makes kids scared and gives them bad dreams," he said. "When kids are watching this, it's a good idea to explore their feelings about the tragedy by saying, 'I think that's scary. How do you feel about it?'" Dr. Haller presents an American Academy of Pediatrics program on the effects of mass media on kids.
CARING FOR THOSE WHO CARED FOR US: Hurricane Katrina taught us several important lessons about caring for our elders in time of disaster, said Nina Tumosa, Ph.D., professor of geriatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and a health educator at the Veteran Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis. "There was no mechanism for the elderly to get access to medications " both emergency and regular," she said. "And many people didn't have a plan in place to care for their pet." Tumosa suggests every senior adults have a pre-packed emergency kit which contains bottled water, extra eyeglasses, hearing aid batteries, flashlights, lists of prescription medicines, names of the doctor and emergency contacts and their Medicare number.
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