Planning for the health and safety of those attending mass gatherings is an enormous challenge for local officials. Mass gatherings are defined as those attracting more than 1,000 participants and include events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, religious services conducted by the Pope, state funerals, and presidential inaugurations. Public health concerns range from ensuring adequate drinking water, food safety, first aid, and toilet facilities to planning for the extremes of possible major accidents, dangerous weather and even terrorist threats.

 The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has compiled a Web page of links to information on the public health aspects of planning for all kinds of mass gatherings, http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/massgatherings.html. These resources include a search of PubMed for medical journal article citations as well as documents from government and other sources. Topics include preparedness for large numbers of casualties and management of disease outbreaks. For more information on the Disaster Information Management Research Center at NLM, please visit http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/. [scb

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 7:40 am and is filed under Emergency Planning, NLM Announcements, Public Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.