RSS Feeds

Earth Science

Space Science

Life Science

Fields of Scientific Study

Nanotechnology

Cancer

Definitions of The Fields of Scientific Study

Survey finds many Katrina evacuees had chronic health problems and no health insurance

September 19, 2005

Boston, MA - To give voice to people whose lives have been devastated by Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing floods, The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health conducted a unique survey of evacuees in shelters in the Houston area. One-third (34%) of Katrina evacuees report that they were trapped in their homes and had to be rescued. Half (50%) of those who were trapped said they waited three or more days to be rescued.

More than 1 in 10 (14%) Hurricane Katrina evacuees report a family member, neighbor or friend was killed by the storm or subsequent flooding, and more than half report that their home was destroyed (55%) Also, the survey found that 2 in 5 (40%) spent at least a day living outside on a street or overpass, and 13% report that some members of their immediate family are still missing. The survey also found that evacuees in Houston shelters face serious health challenges that will complicate relief and recovery efforts.

Key health-related findings include:

# 52% report having no health insurance coverage at the time of the hurricane. Of those with coverage, 34% say it is through Medicaid and 16% through Medicare. Before the hurricane 66% of people evacuated to Houston shelters used hospital or clinics as their main source of care and of those, a majority (54%) used Charity Hospital of New Orleans, substantially more than the second most common care site (University Hospital of New Orleans, at 8%).

# 33% report experiencing health problems or injuries as a result of the hurricane and 78% of them are currently receiving care for their ailments.

# 41% report chronic health conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and asthma.

# 43% say they are supposed to be taking prescription medications, and of those, 29% percent report having problems getting the prescription drugs they need.

# Of the 61% who did not evacuate before the storm, 38% said they were either physically unable to leave or had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave.

# 39% report that they did not get help from any government agency or voluntary agency during the flood and evacuation.

The survey design was co-directed by Robert J. Blendon, Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It is striking how many days people went without medicine, food and water without help from any agency of government or volunteer group," said Blendon. "Many of those who did not evacuate were in poor health and circumstances to begin with and many said they were physically unable to leave."

Among those surveyed, 98% are from the New Orleans area. In surviving this tragedy, an overwhelming majority of the evacuees in Houston shelters (92%) say that religion played an important role in helping them get through the past two weeks.

The Survey of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees is based on a sample of 680 randomly selected adults ages 18 years and older, staying in the Houston Reliant Park Complex (which included the Reliant Astrodome and the Reliant Center), the George R. Brown Convention Center, and five smaller Red Cross shelters in the greater Houston area. Interviews were conducted face-to-face September 10-12, 2005. The margin of error for overall results is plus or minus 4 percentage points.The survey was conducted and analyzed jointly by The Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. Interviews were conducted by 28 professional, Houston-based interviewers under the supervision of staff from Kaiser and ICR/International Communications Research, and with input from The Post staff in Houston. The Red Cross gave The Post/Kaiser/Harvard interviewing team permission to interview at the various centers, but was not a co-sponsor of the survey and bears no responsibility for results presented here.

Full survey toplines and methodology and a link to the Washington Post article are available online.

Harvard School of Public Health

Related Hurricane Katrina Current Events and Hurricane Katrina News Articles

Hurricane Katrina Current Events and Hurricane Katrina News RSS

Researchers can predict hurricane-related power outages
Using data from Hurricane Katrina and four other destructive storms, researchers from Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M universities say they have found a way to accurately predict power outages in advance of a hurricane.

Water scarcity will create global security concerns
Water scarcity as a result of climate change will create far-reaching global security concerns, says Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

New publication offers security tips for WiMAX networks
Government agencies and other organizations planning to use WiMAX- Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access-networks can get technical advice on improving the security of their systems from a draft computer security guide prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Coral bleaching increases chances of coral disease
Mass coral bleaching has devastated coral colonies around the world for almost three decades. Now scientists have found that bleaching can make corals more susceptible to disease and, in turn, coral disease can exacerbate the negative effects of bleaching.

U.S. needs nearly $200 million more on climate-related health research
A recent commentary suggests that the U.S. should spend roughly $197 million more than it currently does to research the impact of climate change on public health.

Major disasters tax surgical staff but may reduce costs for routine operations
New research published in the September issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons offers important insights into the long-term impact of a major disaster on routine surgical services in a hospital.

World's river deltas sinking due to human activity, says new study led by CU-Boulder
A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world's low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.

Tornado threat increases as Gulf hurricanes get larger
Tornadoes that occur from hurricanes moving inland from the Gulf Coast are increasing in frequency, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea
Expansion of coastal cities is accompanied by a decline in the quality of life of the people, which was the reason they moved to the coastal zone instead of bringing growing welfare to the inhabitants.

LSUHSC research helps link schizophrenia to specific DNA region
For the first time, an international group of researchers has found genetic evidence linking schizophrenia to a specific region of DNA - on chromosome 6.

More Hurricane Katrina Current Events and Hurricane Katrina News Articles

	Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne (Author) Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive. As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified...
	1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose (Author) Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators. Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.
	Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security by Christopher Cooper (Author), Robert Block (Author) “[A] tightly crafted, very readable book . . . the best in-depth contemporary analysis we are going to get.”—Stephen Flynn, The Washington Post When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would bring. In this searing indictment of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block take readers inside FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement during the crisis—the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, and the individuals who saw that the system was broken but did nothing to fix it. In this award-winning and critically acclaimed book, Cooper and Block reconstruct the crucial days before and after the storm hit, laying bare the...
	NOVA - Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City Starring: Stacy Keach; Peter Thomas (VI); Don Wescott Directed By: Nova On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing at least 1,300, destroying over 600,000 houses, and turning downtown New Orleans into an uninhabitable swamp. In a compelling hour-by-hour reconstruction of the ferocious storm, NOVA exposes crucial failures in preparation and engineering that led to the worst disaster in U.S. history. The film probes the titanic forces behind hurricanes and the latest technology for tracking and predicting them, showing how scientists precisely foresaw the impact of a strong hurricane on New Orleans a year before Katrina struck. NOVA investigates the fatal flaws in New Orleans’ levees and the huge challenge posed by protecting and rebuilding the city. As global temperatures rise, are killer storms like Katrina a growing...
	The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina--the Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist by Ivor van Heerden (Author), Mike Bryan (Author) The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy—from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane Center After warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.
	Time: Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Changed America by Editors of Time Magazine (Author) DESCRIPTION: On Sept. 2, 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate S.O.S." His city, one of America’s most historic and gracious urban centers, had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now 80% of it lay underwater, while some citizens huddled on rooftops waiting for rescue, and others turned the flooded streets into canals of anarchy. In the first decade of the 21st century, despair, disease and death had transformed a great American city into a scene of third-world privation, even as heroic rescue workers battled to save lives, restore order and aid the suffering. Now Time chronicles the story of the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history in Hurricane Katrina, An American Tragedy. Here, in stunning pictures and gripping first-hand accounts, is the terrible tale...
	The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley (Author) In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes—followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel as the natural disaster itself. In The Great Deluge, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley finds the true heroes of this unparalleled catastrophe, and lets the survivors tell their own stories, masterly allowing them to record the nightmare that was Katrina.
	Holding Out and Hanging on: Surviving Hurricane Katrina by Thomas Neff (Author) Words cannot adequately convey the human dimension of the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Thomas Neff s photographs can. A volunteer in the city in the early days after the flood, this Baton Rouge photographer witnessed firsthand the confusion and suffering, as well as the persistence and strength, of those who stuck it out. The friendship he extended residents enabled him to approach his subjects from a uniquely personal perspective. Readers will meet people from all walks of life who are exhausted by grief and shock but who are determined to hold on to their culture and their city. Neff s gripping black-and-white images and poignant narratives show individuals reorganizing their lives, trying to maintain their individuality, and even enriching their souls as...
	When the Levees Broke - A Requiem In Four Acts (Documentary) Starring: Spike Lee, Sam Pollard One year after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, director Spike Lee presents a four-hour, four-part chronicle recounting, through words and images, one of our country?s most profound natural disasters. In addition to revisiting the hours leading up to the arrival of Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane before it hit the coast of Louisiana, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts tells the personal stories of those who lived to tell about it, at the same time exploring the underbelly of a nation where the divide along race and class lines has never been more pronounced.
	Two Bobbies: A True Story of Hurricane Katrina, Friendship, and Survival by Kirby Larson (Author), Mary Nethery (Author), Jean Cassels (Illustrator) Bobbi and Bob Cat are the best of friends. When their hometown of New Orleans was struck by Hurricane Katrina, many lost everything. But not Bobbi and Bob Cat—they still had each other. Only by staying together could they survive. This is the story of their remarkable friendship.