Many Children Struggling After ’05 Storms

At least 46,600 children along the Gulf Coast are still struggling with mental health problems and other serious aftereffects of 2005 hurricanes, according to a new study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund.

Many of these children are performing poorly in school and have limited access to medical care, according to the study, which combines government statistics with data collected by a group of researchers that has been closely following about 1,250 families displaced by the storm.

The children most at risk are those who have returned to their home states of Louisiana and Mississippi but lack stable living situations, the study says.

They are children like Nicole D. Riley’s daughter Isis, who is about to turn 4. Her family left New Orleans the day before Hurricane Katrina and moved five times over a short period before ending up in the large government-operated trailer park in Baker, La. All those moves “really didn’t sit well with her,” Ms. Riley said of her daughter. “When we got out here to the park, she was out of control, out of hand. She was not like that before the storm.”

Although the uncontrollable temper tantrums have stopped, Ms. Riley said in a telephone interview, Isis remains worrisomely moody, and all three of her children have been suffering from rashes. And they are going to have to move again. The government plans to close the trailer park next spring, and Ms. Riley and her fiancé are already looking for a new place to live.

Doctors treating Isis and other children “have been reporting just tremendous problems, especially the mental health providers,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia. “We are alarmed at the continuing downward trend, the longer the state of limbo continues.”

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