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Emergency Preparedness

Description

Syndromic surveillance information can be a useful for the early recognition of outbreaks, acute public health events and in response to natural disasters. Inhalation of particulate matter from wildland fire smoke has been linked to various acute respiratory and cardiovascular health effects. Historically, wildfire disasters occur across Southern California on a recurring basis. During 2003 and 2007, wildfires ravaged San Diego County and resulted in historic levels of population evacuation, significant impact on air quality and loss of lives and infrastructure. In 2011, the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences awarded Michigan Tech Research Institute a grant to address the impact of fire emissions on human health, within the context of a changing climate. San Diego County Public Health Services assisted on this project through assessment of population health impacts and provisioning of syndromic surveillance data for advanced modeling.

Objective

This presentation describes how syndromic surveillance information was combined with fire emission information and spatio-temporal fire occurrence data to evaluate, model and forecast climate change impacts on future fire scenarios.

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Description

By mid-May 2008, the State of Florida had 102 active wildfires affecting approximately 40,000 acres. In addition, the Mustang Corners Fire in Everglades National Park started on May 14 and burned throughout the month affecting another 40,000 acres of federal land. Smoke from several wildfires cast a haze over parts of south Florida, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a dense smoke advisory. The Governor declared a State of Emergency, the EOC was activated and ESF-8 requested that the Agency for Health Care Administration open a wildfire event in the Emergency Status System to track census and bed availability in the local hospitals.

Objective

We used the syndromic surveillance system ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics) to evaluate emergency room visits with respiratory related chief complaints in an area with decreased air quality associated with wildfires affecting South Florida, 2008.

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Hurricane Sandy hit New York City (NYC) on October 29, 2012. Before and after the storm, 73 temporary evacuation shelters were established. The total census of these shelters peaked at approximately 6,800 individuals. Concern about the spread of communicable diseases in shelters prompted the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) to rapidly develop a surveillance system to report communicable diseases and emergency department transports from shelters. We describe the implementation of this system.

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Disaster epidemiology (i.e., applied epidemiology in disaster settings) presents a source of reliable and actionable information for decision-makers and stakeholders in the disaster management cycle. However, epidemiological methods have yet to be routinely integrated into disaster response and fully communicated to response leaders.

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This report is designed to aid state, territorial, tribal, and local public health leaders as they improve their capacity to achieve situational awareness during a public health emergency. We intend this report to serve as a concise reference work public health leaders can use to help design and manage biosurveillance systems to be used during an anticipated public health emergency.

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Following Hurricane Superstorm Sandy, the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) developed indicators to enhance syndromic surveillance for extreme weather events in EpiCenter, an online system that collects and analyzes real-time chief complaint emergency department (ED) data and classifies each visit by indicator or syndrome.

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Transmission of infectious diseases became an immediate public health concern when approximately 27,000 New Orleans-area residents evacuated to Houston's Astrodome and Reliant Park Complex following Hurricane Katrina. This article presents a surveillance system that was rapidly developed and implemented for daily tracking of various symptoms in the evacuee population in the Astrodome “megashelter.” This system successfully confirmed an outbreak of acute gastroenteritis and became a critical tool in monitoring the course of this outbreak.

Objective

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