Professor Richard Garfield Presented on Reconstruction After Disasters, Comparison of Haiti and Sichuan Earthquakes at the Chinese Institute for Social Sciences in October 2011

Three years after a major earthquake in southern China, the Institute is reviewing its efforts to monitor needs and assist in reconstruction. Comparative international experiences have not been common in China, but modernization is creating an opportunity for such development. Dr. Garfield brought knowledge of baseline assessments, which are improving through the UN system that he helped set up when at the World Health Organization several years ago. Those assessments, created for Libya and the Horn of Africa, are now joint products of the UN-related ACAPS and the US Centers for Disease Control and have become widely used. The Chinese Institute is considering taking part in such international assessments in the future.

The famine in the Horn of Africa is the largest disaster at this time in the world. Columbia’s School of International and Political Affairs featured Dr. Garfield as a speaker in a November program Famine in the Horn - Early Warnings Unheeded?. Other speakers included Gerry Martone, Director of Humanitarian Affairs, International Rescue Committee; Federica D'Andreagiovanni, Coordination Response Division-OCHA Somalia desk; and Sibi Lawson-Marriott, External Relations for Eastern and Central Africa, World Food Programme.

The School of Nursing has been deeply involved in Haiti, especially since a major earthquake there in 2010. Dr. Garfield gave a noon-time presentation on Haiti and our involvement there as part of a series sponsored by the School’s WHO Collaborating Center for Advanced Practice Nurses. He has been featured recently in newspaper articles on the use of cholera vaccine there, and in NPR on the use of cellphone data to monitor population movements in the months after the disaster. Dr. Garfield coauthored an analysis of that data in PLOS medicine this fall. This is the first use of passive data from all subscribers’ cellphones in the country to assess conditions following a disaster. The Chinese Institute was particularly interested in that experience and is preparing now, with Dr. Garfield’s assistance, in a future large scale disaster in their country.