Support and promote water usage and purification in your community.

WATER.  One of the most essential compounds needed for all life.

Support and promote water conservation, and purification in your community, and support others throughout the world in the importance of water.

Remember only 1-percent of the water in the world is available for human consumption.

BEMA


http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/details_linked.asp?pid=8229





This photograph depicts a young Ghanaian woman holding a pipe filter that she wears draped on a cord about her neck. Pipe filters are individual filtration devices, similar to a straw, which allow people to filter their water to avoid contracting Guinea worm disease (GWD) while traveling or working in the field. Persons become infected by drinking water containing copepods (water fleas) harboring the infective stage larvae of Dracunculus medinensis. Once inside the body, the stomach acid digests the water flea, but not the larvae, which find their way to the small intestine, where they penetrate the wall of the intestine and pass into the body cavity. 

During the next 10 - 14 months, the Guinea worms mature to a full size adult 60 - 100cm (2 - 3ft) long, and as wide as a cooked spaghetti noodle. Adult worms mate inside the abdomen. After which, the male dies and the female worm migrates to the site where she will emerge, usually from lower limbs.

Provide communities with safe sources of drinking water (such as from borehole or hand-dug wells), or have existing dysfunctional ones repaired. Because Guinea worm disease (GWD) can only be transmitted through drinking contaminated water, educating people to follow these simple control measures can completely prevent illness and eliminate transmission of the disease:

- Prevent persons with an open Guinea worm ulcer from entering ponds and wells used for drinking water.

- Always filter drinking water, using a household cloth filter or pipe filter, to remove the water fleas which harbor the infective Guinea worm larvae.

- Treat unsafe sources of drinking water with an approved larvicide, such as ABATE®, that kills water fleas.

- Provide communities with safe sources of drinking water (such as from borehole or hand-dug wells), or have existing dysfunctional ones repaired.

Training Opportunity. Cultural Competency. Emergency Preparedness and Crisis Response.

Cultural Competency Curriculum for Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Response

• A free, online educational program accredited for social workers, disaster mental health workers, first responders (including EMTs and firefighters) and emergency managers.
• To learn more about the development process, please visit the Document Archive.
• Visit the program to learn more and to register.

Welcome to Culturally Competency Curriculum for Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Response at HHS OMH’s Think Cultural Health. Each of the programs featured on Think Cultural Health (TCH) are founded on the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (National CLAS Standards).

In April 2013, the National CLAS Standards were re-released after undergoing a two-year enhancement initiative. This program, along with others featured on TCH, is scheduled to be under annual review for accreditation purposes and will be updated to reflect the National CLAS Standards enhancements.

To assist you during this transition, we recommend that you reference this crosswalk (PDF - 115 KB) and fact sheet (PDF - 59 KB) which will assist in understanding the numbering and organization of the re-released National CLAS Standards.

Training Opportunity. Pacific ADA Center. Closing Gaps in Local Emergency Plans and Grassroots Emergency Planning

http://adapresentations.org/schedule.php

Announcing a new webinar - "FEMA Promising Practices: Closing Gaps in Local Emergency Plans and Grassroots Emergency Planning" May 14th, 2015 Webinars begin at 2.30pm ET/1.30pm CT/12.30 pm MT/11.30am PT/8.30am Hawaii. Registration: Free on-line at http://www.adapresentations.org/registration.php This presentation will share two practices that brought people together to bring about increased knowledge and action on emergency preparedness. First, we will hear about the lessons learned from the Massachusetts Active Planning project, which brought together local disability community members with their localities, to work collaboratively, share resources and expertise about emergency preparedness and response for and with people with disabilities, ultimately enhancing resilience for the whole community. Our speakers will focus on a replicable collaborative, inclusive Community Stakeholder Meeting (CSM) gap analysis process to address issues of community-wide concern, such as needs assessment, resident participation in local emergency planning, risk communication, public preparedness education and creative use of community resources to address emergency needs, for example in emergency shelters. Our second set of speakers will describe an effort to get people with disabilities and other access and functional needs to prepare for emergencies, for that group to communicate needs to emergency responders, and to encourage businesses and local civic leaders to plan cooperatively for needs through periodic community meetings. Learning Objectives: Understand how to identify key stakeholders in the community and learn strategies for collaboration. Learn how to perform a gap analysis of your local emergency plan using the Active Planning Workbook and identify priorities and strategies for plan improvement. Learn strategies and practical steps for improving the general state of emergency preparedness in a community. Presenter: Sue Wolf-Fordham and Nancy Shea, Active Planning Project, University of Massachusetts Medical School E.K. Shriver Center Emergency Preparedness & Response Initiative. Ted Stamp Southwestern Center for Independent Living and Tammy VanOverbeke, Lyon County Emergency Manager. To view all of the sessions for the coming year, or to see previous sessions, go to http://www.adapresentations.org/schedule.php Pacific ADA Center 555 12th Street Suite 1030 Oakland, CA 94607

Understanding Nuclear Energy Pros and Cons.

Community and family preparedness internationally.

There are benefits to the use of nuclear energy.  If the waste of nuclear energy is deposited in your back yard how would you feel?

Plan for minor disruptions, and disruptions that persist until it turns into a disaster.

Review (click) on the ‘Radioactive Waste’ heading for more information.

BEMA

This email was sent to BEMA@BlackEmergManagersAssociation.org using GovDelivery, on behalf of: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) · 11555 Rockville Pike · Rockville, MD 20852 · 301-415-7000

Local, Regional, and Internationally. Resilience. The Importance of Community.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3044933/the-power-of-human-resilience-after-major-disasters-and-the-importance-of-community

The Power Of Human Resilience After Major Disasters— And The Importance Of Community

Researchers had the unique chance to measure the "happiness" of vulnerable New Orleans residents before and after Hurricane Katrina. The results are uplifting.

Two years before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, killing 1,800 people and destroying more than 60% of the city’s housing stock, a group of researchers embarked on what was then an average academic study designed to improve the educational performance of about 1,000 low-income parents enrolled at two community colleges in the city.

The storm disrupted the researchers' entire study but proved to have a silver lining: Their initial survey was suddenly incredibly valuable for an entirely different purpose. If the researchers, based at several universities around the country, could get in touch with everyone again, they’d have something relatively rare in social science research: A before and after comparison of how people respond to the worst and most unpredictable kinds of disasters.

The Resilience in Survivors of Katrina ("RISK") Project was born, and the researchers ended up tracking down about 70% of their initial cohort twice: one year after the disaster and again after four years. They conducted the same surveys again, also adding questions about how the hurricane had affected their lives. In the years since these surveys, the RISK project has published dozens of studies that compare the pre- and post-Katrina results on topics ranging from post-traumatic stress, child outcomes, residential mobility, and mental health.

Laurie Barr via Shutterstock

One of the intriguing studies to come out of the work was published recently in theJournal of Happiness Studies. It looked at what you’d expect: The pre- and post-disaster levels of happiness among 491 of the survey participants, all women. It honed in on how they answered the survey question, "If you were to consider your life in general these days, how happy or unhappy would you say you are?"

The results, according Rocio Calvo, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Social Work and the lead researcher on the happiness study, were encouraging and surprising. Even only one year after the storm, almost 89% of women remained in the "somewhat happy" or "very happy" categories, though there was a drop in happiness on average. However, by four years after the storm, almost all of the respondents had gone back to their pre-storm happiness levels. "I think individuals are more resilient than they are given credit for," she says.

This is amazing to think about. These are already vulnerable women who went through major stress because of Katrina—85% of their homes were seriously damaged and almost one-third had lost a family member or close friend. On average, they experienced at least three major stress factors during the storm, such as no medical care for themselves or a loved one or no food to eat.

There was one exception: 38 women who continued to have lower levels of happiness even four years after the storm. They were more likely to be living on their own after the storm and reported consistently lower levels of perceived support from their communities.

"Our research showed that social support, both before and after Hurricane Katrina, was the main factor associated with women's happiness," Calvo says.

Calvo, who also studies happiness in Latino immigrant communities, believes the study underlines the importance of supporting the community fabric in vulnerable populations. Social workers, she says, can’t just come in and dictate how communities should use resources, even if they mean to help. "Communities might be poor and vulnerable, but they may know better than you what works," she says.

[Top Photo: imagist via Shutterstock]