This is the story of a 1 year 2 month old boy born to an 18 year old mother on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. This report/plea for assistance came in recently from a Philippine Physician at one of the remote rural clinics HELP visited during "Needs Assessment" operations recently.

Learn how you can help at the end of this story.

 

Could assetmap.org/uganda be used as a transition tool for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs? 

While the United Nations is routinely assailed for bureaucratic clunkiness, inefficiency, or even corruption, its important to recognize the absolutely vital role that its offices play in "complex man-made emergencies" (also known as "wars") and natural disaster relief.

Payson, AZ 12/10/07 - HELP (www.disasterlogistics.org) is pleased to announce that it is a recipient of a 2007 Award of Excellence in the mobile media ca

HELP's much anticipated mobile telemedicine clinic known as "Doc-in-a-Box" was unveiled during Operations "Golden Phoenix" and "Freedom's Ring" recently.

 

The joint military and civilian disaster exercises were conducted in California and Arizona. The exercise simulated a massive 8.0 earthquake in the Los Angeles basin area. If such an earthquake were to hit massive numbers of people would be expected to evacuate into Arizona.

Holly Ross' post on the NTEN Blog, Community Tweets in the SoCal Fires, gives you links to individuals and organizations reporting news from the fires on blogs and Twitter.

This Flickr photo, Red Sky by Morning, San Diegans Take Warning, was taken by SL Working2 . You can see more photos of the fires in the San Diego, San Diego Fire and Southern California Fires - 2007 Flickr Pools.

Update: A Google Map of the fire is also available.

Last month's Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Ephrat Bitton of iCare and Jonathan Thompson of Humanlink talking about how to use the Web for disaster relief.

You can hear recordings of their presentations and their interviews with our Net Tuesday Podcaster, David Collin of FI Space, on the NetSquared Podcast.

"What we have done is we've deployed and completed the first of what we're calling a "doc in a box". It's a 20 foot cargo container, shipping container, like you see on ships going overseas. On the outside, it looks pretty much like any other container. On the inside is a complete medical clinic, complete with a lot of different telemedicine equipment and satellite uplink gear that enables us to bring a patient wherever this is dropped off, anywhere in the world."

The BBC reported today in, Web Tool to Help Survivors Cope, about a disaster relief system that would connect survivors and donors directly using the Internet, and make delivery of supplies by truck more efficient:

In the iCare system survivors report what they need via web terminals in aid centres or using text messages sent via mobile phones. Their requests are then routed to the companies, organisations or individuals that can provide exactly what they need.

TechSoup, our mother organization, is having a free online event, Disaster Planning, Recovery and IT for Your Nonprofit, May 9-11 in its Tech Planning Community Forum. No registration is required.

Topics will include:
• Safety issues in disaster preparedness.
• Reducing the risk of a disaster.
• Disaster planning and IT.
• Offline measures you can take to prevent a data disaster.

 

Thank you for your votes.

Thanks to you and the assistance this NetSquared competition offers, our efforts to meet the medical needs of people (including specifically the ones pictured here) will be greatly increased.