F. Della Corte

Application of new educational methodologies in disaster medicine

Commonly, Disaster Medicine educational issues are often related to the Emergency Medicine domain, even though in Europe there is no clear definition about these two subjects. Yet, following the extraordinary succession of natural and technological disasters in Europe during the past several years (e.g. Chernobyl, flooding, forest fires), the governments belonging to the European Union are putting increasing pressure on national entities (ministries, universities, hospitals, local governments, etc.) to develop official plans, protocols, and guidelines that can be implemented in case the regular ‘pathways’ fail at any level. The study of disaster situations is included in the core curriculum of many schools at the undergraduate and post-graduate level (ranging from Architecture to Computer Science to Economics), and the possibility of short-, medium-, and long-term chain-reaction effects involving the environment and affected population are being examined. At least in Europe, the body of knowledge belonging to the study of Medicine, despite being very rich and formally exhaustive, is mostly oriented to the ideal situation of doctor and patient, rather than to the occurrence of any type of system failure causing a massive number of casualties and the need to provide treatment, even in hostile environments and over time. Two core subjects, Epidemiology and Occupational Medicine, offer students the possibility to think in terms of hundreds to millions of patients.

Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism in Neurotrauma

Primary neurological injury due to any kind of insult (traumatic, ischaemic, hypoxic, metabolic) can be followed by a chain of pathological events, that can worsen or perpetuate the primary lesion within minutes, hours or days. This group of derangements is traditionally defined as secondary damage, and its principal determinant, regardless of the producing cause, is ischaemia-anoxia.