© 2006 American Public Health Association DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2005.080119
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Sandra Crouse Quinn, PhD, Department of Behavioral and Community Health Sciences, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, 230 Parran Hall, 130 Desoto St, Pittsburgh, PA 15261 (e-mail: squinn@pitt.edu).
Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.
Hurricane Katrina made it evident that natural disasters occur in the same social, historical, and political environment in which disparities in health already exist. The hurricane was only the disaster agent; what created the magnitude of the disaster was the underlying vulnerability of the affected communities. In New Orleans, where 69% of the population is African American and 23% live below the poverty line, thousands of African Americans were stranded after the evacuation order. This article has been cited by other articles:
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