This screening questionnaire included questions about location of pre-hurricane residence, extent of exposure to the hurricane, current mental health, and basic demographics. This was primarily owing to the massive geographic dislocation of the post-geographic post-Katrina population and the attendant difficulties tracing and contacting people in it.Ī short screening questionnaire was administered to a random respondent in each of the households that we contacted in the screening sample to determine eligibility. The percentage of eligible households that could be reached by telephone (the estimated contact rate) of 64.9% was lower than in some household surveys. Between January 19 and March 31, 2006, a total of 1,043 respondents participated in the survey. We oversampled individuals in both frames living in the New Orleans Metropolitan Area before the hurricane. The second sampling frame was through cellular and land-based telephone numbers on approximately 1.4 million families throughout the country that applied for American Red Cross (ARC) assistance after Hurricane Katrina. It is worth noting that many displaced people were traceable because they were able to forward calls made to their pre-hurricane numbers. The first sampling frame was through a random-digit dial (RDD) of households listed in telephone banks from eligible parishes or counties before the hurricane. Our study’s target sample was English-speaking adults, 18 years of age and over, who resided before the hurricane in a parish or county that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) subsequently defined as eligible for assistance after Hurricane Katrina, 1 and who were reachable using 1 of 2 telephone sampling frames. Our goal in doing so is to help inform the design and targeting of future relief efforts that better ensure the health of disaster survivors with chronic disease. We then identify correlates and reasons for disrupted care. In this report, we describe the prevalence of chronic medical conditions in a geographically representative survey of Katrina survivors, and the extent to which those with chronic illnesses cut back or terminated treatments because of the disaster. However, there is a paucity of systematically collected data on Katrina’s survivors with chronic illness to truly ascertain how their care was impacted by the disaster. 12, 13 This large and frail group might be expected to suffer disproportionately from all aspects of the disaster, including: initial pre-storm evacuation and post-storm displacement loss of access to health care providers, facilities, or treatments and a relief response criticized for being slow and poorly coordinated 14, 15 Anecdotal evidence 16 – 19 suggests that patients with a wide range of chronic diseases-such as cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, cancer, respiratory illness, HIV/AIDS, renal disease, dementia, and mental disorders-had their treatment disrupted. Unfortunately, the disaster response has been much less robust for survivors with chronic illnesses. 3, 4 Katrina has been no exception, with initial efforts focused on providing shelter, food, water, and mitigation of injuries from environmental hazards, infectious diseases, or other acute conditions. 1, 2 Emergency responses to such disasters typically address immediate health needs, storm-related injuries, and acute illness in the aftermath. In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina and subsequent levee breaches devastated 1.5 million inhabitants of an area the size of Great Britain with over 1,600 killed, hundreds of thousands displaced, and more than $100 billion in federal aid already allocated or requested, it has become the costliest natural disaster in U.S.
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