Tulane University researchers are leading a study examining the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina. The national project will examine the health effects of the storm, who came back, and where they are now.
The National Institutes of Health is providing $6.7 million over five years. It will pay for the study, and establishing the Tulane Center for Studies on Displaced Populations.
Mark VanLandingham is a professor of global community health and behavioral sciences at Tulane. He says there is still much to learn about Katrina – especially in the long term.
“There’s a lot of stuff out there about Katrina and what some of the impacts were. There’s a lot of attention paid to the first year or two after the catastrophe, and then everything kind of goes away.”
He will be working with the Vietnamese fishermen he had been tracking as a comparison of how they fared here as opposed to their colleagues who remained in Vietnam. He’s now hoping to record the impact of a disaster on immigrant communities. And he will be coordinating with Harvard researchers who worked with first-generation college students – mostly single mothers -- at Delgado Community College. Researchers will now examine the effect of a disaster on an upwardly mobile but disadvantaged population.
“A lot of people are going to improve, but not everybody," he said. "And kind of knowing who’s going to improve and who isn’t in the long term is really important.”
He says researchers at New York and Brown universities and the University of Michigan are also participating.