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Manage stress with CDC's Surviving Field Stress for First Responders

Emergency Management Alert, April 18, 2007

"The rate of psychiatric illness among children who lost a parent in the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack doubled - from about 32 to nearly 73 percent - in the years following the event," says a new study from researchers at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. "More than half (56.8 percent) of the young children studied suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which affected nearly three in 10 bereaved children." Results appear in this month's edition of Biological Psychiatry.

The news reminded us of a quote we'd read in a 2005 publication from the CDC.

"Terrorist attacks result in greater psychological casualties than natural disasters or technological accidents. Deliberate cruelty and violence by others is the most damaging of all types of stress.... A recent study of the Oklahoma City bombing found that 45% of the people at the site had a psychological injury and 30% had bomb-related post-traumatic stress disorder...."

That excerpt is from the Surviving Field Stress for First Responders, a 60-page manual, published in 2005, that describes in simple language the physical, emotional and mental stressors first responders face when called to a technological disaster or terrorist attack.

'Technological' is the newest category of disaster. According to the CDC, it is a human-caused disaster that may include such events as plane crashes, building collapses, hazardous material incidents, and intentional releases of chemical, biological, and nuclear materials by terrorists.

Here's a link to the manual: http://www2.cdc.gov/phtn/webcast/stress-05/TrainingWorkbookstress-editp1.pdf
 

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