Residential natural hazard risk and mental health effects.

Mental health effects are frequently reported following natural disasters. However, little is known about effects of living in a hazard-prone region on mental health. We analyzed data from 9,312 Gulf Long-term Follow-up Study participants who completed standardized mental health questionnaires including the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (depression=score≥10), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Questionnaire-7 (anxiety=score≥10), and Primary Care PTSD Screen (PTSD=score≥3).

Examining the effects of cumulative environmental stressors on Gulf Coast child and adolescent health.

This study examines how community-level cumulative environmental stress affects child and adolescent emotional distress and chronic health conditions both directly and indirectly through stressors at the household, family, and individual levels. Data comes from the Women and their Children's Health (WaTCH) Study, which sought to understand the health implications of exposure to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) among a cohort of 596 mothers with children ages 10 to 17 in southeastern Louisiana. Community-level environmental stress was measured using a newly developed geospatial index.

Degree and direction of overlap between social vulnerability and community resilience measurements.

An ongoing debate in academic and practitioner communities, centers on the measurement similarities and differences between social vulnerability and community resilience. More specifically, many see social vulnerability and community resilience measurements as conceptually and empirically the same. Only through a critical and comparative assessment can we ascertain the extent to which these measurement schemas empirically relate to one another.

A spatial assessment of prostate cancer mortality-to-incidence ratios among South Carolina veterans: 1999-2015.

Purpose: To assess veteran-specific prostate cancer (PrCA) mortality-to-incidence ratios (MIR) in South Carolina's (SC) veteran population.

Methods: U.S.

Methodological challenges to confirmatory latent variable models of social vulnerability.

Socially vulnerable communities experience disproportionately negative outcomes following natural disasters and underscoring a need for well-validated measures to identify those at risk. However, questions have surfaced regarding the factor structure, internal consistency, and generalizability of social vulnerability measures. A reliance on data-driven techniques, which are susceptible to sample-specific characteristics, has likely exacerbated the difficulty generalizing social vulnerability measures across contexts.

Natural hazards and mental health among US Gulf Coast residents.

Background: Individuals affected by disasters are at risk for adverse mental health sequelae. Individuals living in the US Gulf Coast have experienced many recent major disasters, but few studies have explored the cumulative burden of experiencing multiple disasters on mental health.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the relationship between disaster burden and mental health.

Characterization of Florida, U.S. landfills with elevated temperatures.

The occurrence of elevated temperatures within landfills is a challenging issue for landfill operators to detect and correct. Little is known regarding the causes of elevated temperatures (ETs) or the number of landfills currently operating under such conditions. Therefore, the goal of this research was to determine which landfills within Florida have been impacted by ETs, and to develop a more complete understanding of the factors that may lead to these landfills becoming elevated temperature landfills (ETLFs).

Benchmarking Community Disaster Resilience in Nepal.

Building disaster resilience is a stated goal of disaster risk reduction programs. Recent research emphasizes a need for a greater understanding of community disaster response and recovery capacity so that communities can absorb shocks and withstand severe conditions and progress through the recovery period more efficiently. Nepal, which is prone to a multitude of hazards and having recently experienced a large earthquake in 2015, provides a unique opportunity for exploring disaster resilience in the developing world context.

Advancing emergency management higher education: Importance of cultural competence scholarship.

The evolving demographics, needs, and demands of society requires managers to be culturally competent in all phases of emergency management, especially when responding to disasters. A culturally incompetent manager and/or organization can increase a hazard's impact on often already vulnerable communities. Are cultural competencies lacking in emergency management education? Are these competencies as important as other highly regarded emergency management competencies? What are effective pedagogy and andragogy to create, implement, and evaluate cultural competency in emergency management higher education? As scholars work to advance the emergency management discipline, there is an increasing need for scholarship of teaching and learning research, especially regarding cultural competency.

A GIS Approach to Identifying Socially and Medically Vulnerable Older Adult Populations in South Florida.

Purpose Of The Study: We define, map, and analyze geodemographic patterns of socially and medically vulnerable older adults within the tri-county region of South Florida.

Design And Methods: We apply principal components analysis (PCA) to a set of previously identified indicators of social and medical vulnerability at the census tract level. We create and map age-stratified vulnerability scores using a geographic information system (GIS), and use spatial analysis techniques to identify patterns and interactions between social and medical vulnerability.