The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board explores and identifies the most urgent needs and actions required to accelerate preparedness for health emergencies, focusing in particular on biological risks manifesting as epidemics and pandemics. The Board identified seven actions for implementation to prepare for pressing threats.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to review the federal public health and medical services response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The report examines the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) actions and leadership of this response. Following the review, GAO made seven recommendations.
This report highlights recent developments in Additive Manufacturing (AM) relevant to nuclear proliferation and adds analyses of the impact of AM on delivery systems as well as chemical and biological weapons programs. Focusing on AM developments in both North America and Western Europe, this report maps latest AM developments, projects AM development out to 2030, and applies those findings to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation pathways.
The 2018 National Household Survey measures individuals' attitudes and behaviors toward preparedness and assesses what influences them to prepare for specific hazards. The Federal Emergency Management Agency surveys the American public yearly to assess how the culture of personal disaster preparedness and resilience has changed over time in the United States.
This bulletin focuses on the experiences of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) before, during, and after disasters. Research focused on individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and on individuals with SMI as defined in part through functional limitations.
Meeting their constitutional duties to provide for the common defense, the U.S. Congress and the Administration established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to lead the national effort to protect our critical infrastructure. This document is the keystone of this new agency.
Evacuation and shelter-in-place protective actions are prompted by a variety of threats and hazards. Incident-specific circumstances drive the relevant protective actions based on a community’s demographics, infrastructure, resources, authorities, and decision-making process. Determining that an evacuation needs to take place is not an all-or-nothing approach. Lessons learned from disasters, such as hurricanes Katrina, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, highlight the value of enacting a zone-phased approach to evacuation and shelter-in-place, enabling jurisdictions to move as few people as necessary. Sheltering-in-place populations that are not directly in harm’s way, rather than having them evacuate, helps jurisdictions reduce costs, resource requirements, and the negative impacts of evacuations, while promoting improved response and quicker re-entry and recovery.
The 2019 National Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA): Overview and Methodology provides an in-depth description of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) approach to completing a national-level risk assessment. The intended audience is emergency management officials engaged in risk assessment at the community and federal levels, as well as other practitioners in the private sector or academia.
This bulletin focuses on mental health and substance use issues and conditions in children and youth after human-caused disasters, such as oil spills, radiation disasters, public health emergencies, incidents of mass violence, and terrorism.
This document contains planning considerations that emergency medical services (EMS) medical directors, EMS systems planners, and hospital emergency planners should review when developing mass casualty incident plans and training programs. The focus of this paper is specifically designed to educate emergency planners on the key distinctions of no-notice, dynamic incident scenes with exceedingly large numbers of patients.
