Speaker: Dr Thomas Huggins

Time: 3:00-4:00 p.m., 1 April 2020 (Wed)

Online Platform: Tencent Meeting (ID: 569 231 966;  Live:https://meeting.tencent.com/s/5QadQ51e89579）

Language: English

Abstract:

The inverse care law states that the public health of vulnerable populations is often the least cost-effective to address, leading to the relative neglect of health-related vulnerabilities. This general concept has also been applied to case studies of emergency management in Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom. The cost and other difficulties of managing hazards faced by vulnerable populations in these settings has meant that socio-economic and other disadvantages have only worsened over time. For the purposes of emergency management, this dynamic is called the inverse response law. However, the specificity of this term does not mean that public health is excluded from emergency management scenarios. For example, ash fall from the 2015 eruption of the Volcán de Fuego in Colima, Mexico created a public health emergency among a few hundred rural households, within 12 kilometres of the volcano’s crater. Responding agencies struggled to assist residents affected by approximately 40 millimetres of ash fall. The hazards faced by thousands of urban households, located more than 30 kilometres from the crater, were much more efficiently managed. The latter was achieved without any substantial costs to disaster management or public health agencies. Comparable dynamics can also be observed in responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Thomas Huggins is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Psychology programme at UIC, where he has been employed since 2020. Before coming to China in 2019, he was employed for more than a decade at Massey University, in New Zealand. This included almost eight years working for the Joint Centre for Disaster Research, a collaboration between the School of Psychology and New Zealand's Geological and Nuclear Science institute. Thomas  continues to hold an honorary role with the Joint Centre, where he is an Associate Editor for the Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies.