Health-Related Emergency Disaster Risk Management (Health-EDRM)

Disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones, floods, heat waves, nuclear accidents, and large scale pollution incidents take lives and cause exceptionally large health problems. The majority of large-scale disasters affect the most vulnerable populations, which are often comprised of people of extreme ages, in remote living areas, with endemic poverty, and with low literacy. Health-related emergency disaster risk management (Health-EDRM) [1] refers to the systematic analysis and management of health risks surrounding emergencies and disasters; it plays an important role in reducing hazards and vulnerability along with extending preparedness, response, and recovery measures. This concept encompasses risk analyses and interventions, such as accessible early warning systems, timely deployment of relief workers, and the provision of suitable drugs and medical equipment, to decrease the impact of disaster on people before, during, and after disaster events. Disaster risk profiling and interventions can be at the personal/household, community, and system/political levels; they can be targeted at specific health risks including respiratory issues caused by indoor burning, re-emergence of infectious disease due to low vaccination coverage, and gastrointestinal problems resulting from unregulated waste management. Unfortunately, there has been a major gap in the scientific literature regarding Health-EDRM. The aim of this Special Issue of IJERPH was to present papers describing/reporting the latest disaster and health risk analyses, as well as interventions for health-related disaster risk management, in an effort to address this gap and facilitate major global policies and initiatives for disaster risk reduction

Fuelling the zero-emissions road freight of the future: routing of mobile fuellers

The future of zero-emissions road freight is closely tied to the sufficient availability of new and clean fuel options such as electricity and Hydrogen. In goods distribution using Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) a major challenge in the transition period would pertain to their limited autonomy and scarce and unevenly distributed refuelling stations. One viable solution to facilitate and speed up the adoption of ECVs/HFCVs by logistics, however, is to get the fuel to the point where it is needed (instead of diverting the route of delivery vehicles to refuelling stations) using "Mobile Fuellers (MFs)". These are mobile battery swapping/recharging vans or mobile Hydrogen fuellers that can travel to a running ECV/HFCV to provide the fuel they require to complete their delivery routes at a rendezvous time and space. In this presentation, new vehicle routing models will be presented for a third party company that provides MF services. In the proposed problem variant, the MF provider company receives routing plans of multiple customer companies and has to design routes for a fleet of capacitated MFs that have to synchronise their routes with the running vehicles to deliver the required amount of fuel on-the-fly. This presentation will discuss and compare several mathematical models based on different business models and collaborative logistics scenarios

Library websites popularity: does Facebook really matter?

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the utilization of social media (Facebook) is an important factor in increasing the visibility of the library site usage in Malaysian public universities. Nine top ranked Malaysian public universities involved in this research and number of Facebook followers for each library website is listed. Alexa software was used as the approach to study the issue of visibility. Alexa is able to determine web site usage, by showing the percentage of visitors of library related subdomain(s) as listed in the top subdomains for each University website (domain) over a month. It is found that Universiti Utara Malaysia library website scored the highest percentage of visitors based on the library related subdomain(s) as listed in the top subdomains for the University website in Alexa. To check such irregularities in access, this paper use EvalAccess 2.0 and it is found that Universiti Sains Malaysia’s library website scored higher irregularities. In term of number of Facebook followers, Univesity of Malaya library has the highest score. It is showed that the utilization of social media (Facebook) is not yet an important factor in increasing the visibility of the library websites. However, expectedly, top ranked universities’ library web sites, are more visible and popular. This research is limited to the situation in Malaysia where public universities are more noticeable and seldom face financial constraints rather than private universities. It is highly important for those universities’ library web sites that are not highly visible to initiate the necessary measures in improving the development of their web sites as the usage of the website is an indicator of online quality