Tuesday, April 26, 2011

As Seen from Outer Space

When I see photos of the earthquake and tsunami aftermath in Japan, the images are quite shocking. It’s as if you are looking at something that can’t possibly be real. Entire communities literally swept away. One minute there and the next...gone. I moved to Seattle in 1983, three years after Mt. St. Helens blew her top and you could still walk through that area in complete disbelief that it was real. Entire forests were laid flat and stripped of life. They laid there like millions of giant toothpicks in patterns of lines and swirls across thousands of acres of mountainside. The force of nature was beyond comprehension.

When I think of areas such as Fukushima, Japan, or Christchurch, New Zealand, or Port Au Prince, Haiti, or the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, it makes me wonder where is the line? Over which spot was it OK? Did someone “miss the bullet” so to speak by being in one spot and not another?

Photos taken from the Space Station are stunningly beautiful and I could gaze at them for hours – something that I imagine is one of the things that consume much of the astronauts’ free time... But it reminds me that there are no borders for disasters. There is no clear line over which disaster may not go. Natural disasters, at least, care not for historical structures or the location of schools. They care not for who lives in the building, the town or the ocean. They simply happen.

So when we prepare for disasters, do we worry about where those lines are drawn? Which stuff is mine, or yours, or whose responsibility is it? If we look from outer space, there are no lines, no arrows, no absolutes. Just a planet with people, places and things. So, let’s all pitch in and get ready, for you, your neighbor, that guy across town or across the ocean.

We are all in this together. Go Earth!

Monday, April 18, 2011

The Simplicity of Complexity

There is no use in hiding it. I am a math nut. Yes, one of those really weird people who really love mathematics, fooling around with numbers and all of that possibly outside-the-norm stuff. In fact, I dream in numbers and think of numbers when I am conscious at some of the least expected times. But before all you therapists out there start emailing me your next available slot, I think I am relatively OK otherwise. Just crazy about numbers.

Which bring me to today’s topic – Mathematics Awareness Month! You can hardly imagine how excited I was when, after all these years, I found out only this past weekend of this fantastic annual event. My discovery came during the April 16 program on NPR in which Sanford University Professor, Keith Devlin, was describing this year’s topic, Unraveling Complex Systems. What really got me hooked was his statement that, “Complex systems are inherently non-unravelable. The best you can do is gain a holistic understanding by running simulations.”

Holy quadratic equations, Batman! Isn’t that what emergency preparedness is all about? [OK, how many of you were trying to see how I was finally going to make a connection...] Preparing for disaster is in essence preparing for everything. Floods, earthquakes, fires, terrorism, tornadoes. That is a complex and a daunting task. Which, incidentally, is why so many people delay getting prepared, or deny that preparedness does them any good.

So, if we think of what Dr. Devlin said, that we gain an understanding by running simulations, then we are all closer to simplifying a very complex problem by doing just that – running simulations in the form practice drills, practicing your fire escape, practice turning off the gas to your house (but DON’T turn it off until you have a real emergency!), practicing what to do when an armed gunman enters your classroom, practicing drop, cover and hold on... It is all simulation to help you understand how the real thing works, then being able to do it when the real thing occurs.

Complexity to simplicity. It can work. You just have to play with the numbers.

Monday, April 11, 2011

A History Lesson to Save Your Life

A collective gasp and shaking of heads occurs every time we learn of a shooting that occurs on a school or university. The venues changes, but the outcome is nearly always the same... Student, armed, walks onto the school or campus and shoots other students and teachers. People die, then the shooter usually kills himself. Later we find that the shooter had mental illness—sometimes overt, sometimes not. The killings mostly seem random, but always are senseless.

Four years ago this very week, a student shot and killed 32 people before shooting himself at Virginia Tech. From the grief and horror of this terrible act, some good did come out of it. For one, the awareness of dealing with those with severe mental illnesses has been greatly heightened. Schools are now actively engaged in their student populations to gain more information, earlier, when things are going south with one of their own. Also, the way in which we prepare people for such incidents has changed as well. When once we trained to, “hide and shelter,” we now know that sometimes you just can’t wait.

After Columbine and now Virginia Tech, police have learned that it is often best to run away from trouble, as quickly as possible. Barricading can work to protect a person, but only if that barricade is sturdy enough to keep out an intruder and does involve using a person to hold it in place. Through the heroics of one professor at Virginia Tech, Liviu Librescu, who held the door’s barricade, some student managed to escape, while he was shot fatally through the door.

We have learned now that first thing is to run. We know that if have no where to run, but we can lock the door, we can deny entry and avoid deadly fire. However, we now also know that we lose options one and two, that the only hope to survival is to fight back.

A group called “ACT, or Attack Countermeasures Training,” among others, are now offering classes in how to launch an attack on an armed person. These groups teach you how to barricade and how to set up attack groups. You learn how you can use strength in numbers to overcome a person with a gun and ultimately change the situation. See a sample video at http://prepare.fullerton.edu/shelter-in-place.htm

On some level it is downright frightening to think that you need to learn how to do this, but history teaches us we have no choice. When it comes to a situation of an unstable person and a gun and you act passively, you will likely die.

So, listen to history and the cries of those who fell before us. Learn and live.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Nuclear Primordial Soup

Having knowledge is a good thing. Having a little bit of knowledge and applying it liberally to everything around you is, at a minimum, annoying, but could actually be harmful. Take the issue of protecting yourself from radiation. With the damage from the Japanese nuclear power facilities seemingly worse every day, people are really gearing up their fears. Certainly the situation in Japan is sad and concerning, but that does not mean that we should react as though Fukushima were down the street from our house.

As a health physicist for over 18 years, the one thing I strove to do was to education people about radioactivity. Every day it is used beneficially in medicine, research, manufacturing and therapy. But, it also has a “bad side” if unchecked and used inhumanely, as the Japanese can sadly attest. That said, radioactivity is not new on Planet Earth. In fact, Earth was radioactive from the start, and has been gradually “decaying” over four and a half billion years. Everything on earth has evolved from a radioactive atmosphere, although today’s level of radiation is greatly reduced from the days of the original Primordial Soup.

In the April 3, 2011, Los Angeles Times, Chris Woolston wrote an article on the fear of radiation here in the United States and that people are grasping anxiously for anything to protect them from the clouds of radiation undoubtedly wafting over the Pacific. The fact is that if all of the Japanese fuel rods burned up and became airborne, that the amount of radiation received on our coast would still be extraordinarily small and probably add little change to our chance of illness or disease in our lifetimes.

However, people are afraid of things they don’t understand, so they grab onto things which are easy and obtainable. According to Woolston, people believe that taking supplements, especially iodine, and changing to macrobiotic diets [miso soup, brown rice and seaweed] will protect them from radiation. Actually, for healthy individuals, these foods are low fat and could be very good for you. The problem is that many people are sensitive or allergic to iodine. If you are allergic to shellfish, it is probably the iodine that gets you. Additionally, iodine varies in the type of seaweed, some varying by as much as 1000 fold!

There is strong evidence that antioxidants (such as that in soybeans) can help protect DNA from damage, but our DNA has been the subject of damage from those Primordial Soup days and will continue to do so. While some DNA damage is harmful, it is also how we got to where we are today. DNA change is the basis for evolution and all living things on earth are subject to it.

When someone tells me that I need to “eat only,” or “eliminate” a certain thing from my diet, I like to remember what Julia Child once said, which I am sure I am paraphrasing – “Eat a little bit of everything.” Small amounts of most anything are good, but large doses – like iodine supplements or certain seaweed -- could be quite harmful.

So, when protecting yourself, you can do so with what you eat. Just make sure it is full of a variety of nutritional elements and omit the dash of fear. Now that’s a healthy bowl of soup.