Disaster Response Network

sciencedailey.com - July 28, 2011

ScienceDaily (July 28, 2011) — Social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare may be an important key to improving the public health system's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, according to a New England Journal of Medicine "Perspective" article from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to be published this week. From earthquakes to oil spills or other industrial accidents to weather-related events like heat waves and flooding, the authors suggest that harnessing crowd-sourcing technologies and electronic communications tools will set the stage to handle emergencies in a quicker, more coordinated, effective way.

Noting that more than 40 million Americans use social media Web sites multiple times a day, the researchers suggest that social media enables an unprecedented, two-way exchange between the public and public health professionals. Officials can "push" information to the public while simultaneously "pulling" in data from lay bystanders.

While many feared radiation from a stricken Japanese nuclear facility would drift across the Pacific and settle on the United States, fallout of a different kind certainly has—deep concern about the safety of nuclear reactors.

The belated brouhaha follows a series of disasters at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which lost power and experienced what’s thought to be a partial meltdown of two reactor cores after the country was struck by a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11.

In the days that followed the catastrophe, conflicting reports about the causes of explosions, the amount of radiation released, and the prospects of ending the threats helped fuel confusion and shine a spotlight on the issue of nuclear safety and preparedness. Americans and others worldwide began asking that age-old question, “Can it happen here?”