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Abstract
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OBJECTIVES:
On December 2003 in Iran, the "Bam earthquake" caused 43,000 people lost. On August 2005 in the United States, "Hurricane Katrina" caused 986 people lost. The aim of the current study was to determine how scientic communities have responded to these natural disasters by documenting the different aspects of them in the format of scientic articles.
Methods:
The well-known PubMed search engine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) was searched in June 2014 using "Bam earthquake" and "Hurricane Katrina" as the keywords. In the second round of the search, the Persian Scientic Information Database search engine (http://www.sid.ir/fa/index.asp) was also searched using two previous keywords that were translated into Persian.
Results:
The first search strategy retrieved 54 articles for "Bam earthquake" and 864 articles for "Hurricane Katrina." The second search strategy retrieved 66 articles for "Bam earthquake" and 0 articles for "Hurricane Katrina." Dividing the total retrieved articles by the number of deaths has revealed that for "Bam earthquake" nearly 0.0028 articles and for "Hurricane Katrina" nearly 0.88 articles per death have been indexed, respectively.
Conclusions:
The results of the current study have clearly demonstrated that overall there are shortages of scientic studies of "Bam earthquake" in comparison to "Hurricane Katrina."
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On December 2003, a 6.5 Richter scale earthquake totally destroyed Bam, a city which is located in the southeast of Iran. It has been estimated that more than 43,000 and 30,000 people were killed and injured, respectively. Soon after the earthquake there had been substantial amounts of national and international responses. The magnitude of "Bam earthquake" was so huge that it has been considered as one of the most catastrophic disasters to have hit Iran.
On August 2005, the deadliest hurricane since 1928 that is, Hurricane Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast. The hurricane caused substantial damage to Louisiana and Mississippi residents. In total, 986 Katrina-related deaths were recorded. Further investigation has revealed that "poverty," "high-density housing," "immigrant status," "poor English language prociency," and "ethnic minorities" all have increased the vulnerability of the populations that were hit by disaster...
Language: en |