In this series of essays, physicians write about the unprecedented scale and impact of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. The authors discuss the immediate challenges they faced and address the public health concerns in the aftermath. Unexpected ...

When dawn broke on Tuesday, August 30, it was clear that everything was completely different. I looked out the window to discover that the hotel was surrounded by three to five feet of water, and there was water filling most of Canal Street. There was an ...

Never before Hurricane Katrina has a disaster caused such a massive displacement of a U.S. population. Never before has the country seen so vividly the exposure and vulnerability of displaced persons — primarily the poor, the infirm, and the elderly. We ...

When Hurricane Katrina hit, my wife and I responded in a fashion common to many New Orleans residents: we “vertically evacuated” to the lower floors of one of the city's larger hotels. This had been a successful routine for many years. But when the storm ...

The terms “malfeasance” and “negligence” have been bandied about by many who are frustrated by the official response to Hurricane Katrina. Beginning with the evacuation orders before the hurricane's landfall, some public officials appeared to be trying ...

On Tuesday, August 31, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Sylvester Donaldson (not his real name) landed at the emergency room of the Ochsner Clinic Foundation in New Orleans, desperately ill, having missed more than a week of dialysis treatments. He ...

The skyscraper housing the oldest continuously operating hospital in the country, New Orleans' Charity Hospital, was erected in 1936, to replace a centuries-old complex that had grown rapidly to keep pace with the health needs of impoverished southern ...

There is nothing that I had ever witnessed in the United States to which I could compare the scene outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Thousands upon thousands of people were collected on the boulevard — from infants to the elderly to people in ...