The American Medical Association last week introduced a new medical journal billed as the first of its kind devoted to the science of disaster planning and response.
The peer-reviewed quarterly journal is titled Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Its first edition features articles about Hurricane Katrina, the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the December 26, 2004 tsunami in Indonesia.
Deaths and illness from disasters such as these need to be studied to help health professionals better prepare and prevent similar problems in future disasters, said Dr. Kevin U. Stephens, Sr., author of one of the Katrina studies.
Stephens, director of the New Orleans Health Department, wrote about data he says shows that Katrina-related deaths and sickness have continued long after the storm passed.
The new journal provides a forum for this type of research and is “an unprecedented resource” for health care professionals in the post-September 11 era, said Dr. James J. James, editor-in-chief and director of the AMA’s Center for Public Health Preparedness and Disaster Response.
The journal is published for the AMA by Lippincott Williams &
Wilkins. An online version is available at www.ama-assn.org/go/DMPHP.
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