Disaster Preparedness and Response Toolkit: Disaster Preparedness Tools

The International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID) has a well-established e-mail alerting service for sharing surveillance data about global outbreaks, infectious diseases, and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health.

Guidebook for emergency response and hazardous response teams.

All-hazards articles in the scholarly literature is a database of citations for more than 20,000 scholarly articles and 5,000 conference proceedings covering all-hazards topics. The U.S. Fire Administration of the Federal Emergency Management Agency maintains the database.

Disaster Lit: Database for Disaster Medicine and Public Health is the National Library of Medicine (NLM) database of links to disaster medicine and public health documents available on the Internet at no cost. Documents include expert guidelines, research reports, conference proceedings, training classes, fact sheets, websites, databases, and similar materials for a professional audience. NLM selects materials from over 1,400 non-commercial publishing sources and supplements disaster-related resources from PubMed (biomedical journal literature) and MedlinePlus (health information for the public).

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) makes available statistics on reported communicable diseases through its Surveillance Atlas.

Contains documents related to homeland security policy, strategy, and organizational management, including information related to terrorism and natural and man-made disasters. It also includes a Federal Emergency Management Agency Lessons Learned Information Sharing Collection. The HSDL is maintained by the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

Created for public use containing data providing post-disaster recovery information.

The World Health Organization (WHO) publishes a regular report of disease outbreaks on its Web site, Disease Outbreak News (DONs).

ReliefWeb is an information tool from the United Nations that contains humanitarian information on disasters around the world. It is designed for relief workers assisting in recovery efforts and is optimized for use on mobile devices. ReliefWeb also contains status reports from disaster-impacted areas around the world. The information tool was designed to assist humanitarian workers in decision making and planning effective recovery interventions.

Resources for substance abuse treatment.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collects and presents state-level communicable disease statistics through its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The MMWR is useful for outbreak tracking for preparedness purposes.

NLM Disaster Health Special Topics pages were created for professional members of the disaster workforce and contain resources on common topics, like coping with disasters, and health and environmental hazards following disasters.

• The NLM Emergency Access Initiative (EAI) is a source for free scholarly journal content for populations in areas affected by disasters. The initiative is a partnership between NLM and publishers to enable free access to journal literature.