Children and Disasters

National Commission on Children and Disasters. 2010 Report to the President and Congress. AHRQ Publication No. 10-M037. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. October 2010.

An interesting report on the special problems of children in disasters. While children certainly have special needs in disasters, these reports on different special populations raise the issue of disaggregating disaster response, especially evacuations. Emergency response and evacuation systems have limited resources and tasking them will multiple strategies for multiple populations will make it difficult for them to serve any populations effectively. This again raises the issue of the importance of mitigation and disaster avoidance as opposed to disaster response.