Portugal Safety and Security Report Wednesday 22nd May 2024
Good morning. Anything that helps in improving the forecasting rural fires is good news! So we therefore welcome the IPMA’s announcement yesterday that they have reinforced its meteorological device for the rural fire season of 2024, with the entry into operation of two new double polarized weather radars and two new meteorological stations installed in Coruche and Loulé and also, 2 new ray detectors installed in Olhão and in Viana do Castelo.
This equipment will make it possible to improve the surveillance and overall forecasting of rural fire danger and local weather conditions on the fire front, particularly during pyro cumulus cloud formation and potential ignitions generated by electrical discharges.
Added to that radar information operation terminals have also been installed at Faro, Cascais, Lisbon and Porto Airports which serve as workstations complementary to the national forest fire monitoring system – and in addition to the Operational Centre at IPMA headquarters – a closer support at the theatres of operation.
In the presentation of DECIR (the operational rural fire plan for this year) for this year, the president of ANEPC highlighted that this “is a collective effort of the operatives” who are part of it, but also of all citizens, as everyone, “within the scope of active citizenship”, are “truly, civil protection agents”. This is an important statement, in effect reminding us all that everyone has a roll to play in preventing fires.
Emphasising this further Duarte da Costa added that “the critical success factors of this system are prevention and awareness campaigns”, stressing that “the fire campaign is not won through fighting, but through prevention”.
In this regard, he listed the “permanent monitoring of risk assessments and their impact on the territory, pre-positioning and preventive mobilization of means and resources” and “early detection, as early as possible, supported by an increasingly broad collaborative approach to surveillance and all technical surveillance capabilities”.
The above has to be the priority because if we everyone has greater awareness and are more prepared, then the number of ignitions will be reduced. With weather conditions becoming more extreme with extended periods in some areas with very little or no rain, when fires do start then the potential is that they will burn with greater intensity and cover larger areas. When these reach extreme/critical levels this means that it becomes difficult if not impossible for fires to be suppressed by traditional means of fire-fighting, and it relies on the timely arrival of rain, reduction of winds, or other changes of weather to bring such fires to a conclusion – a frightening thought! This is a reason which mega-fires can burn for extended periods covering several days or even weeks which we have seen in Australia, USA and Canada for example.
As we did in 2022 and 2023 we will be sharing fire danger and risk forecasts, with explanations on a daily basis – please read these so you can be prepared.
Have a good week ahead.
News
Reporting desk wants to give visibility to the problems of immigrants and refugees,
Lisbon, May 21, 2024 (Lusa) – A reporting desk for immigrants and refugees opens today on the internet, aimed at reporting problems and abuses in order to give visibility to the most serious situations.
“We have felt the need for this project for some time, because we have come into contact with some situations, some occurrences among the migrant and refugee population in Portugal, which they do not find answers at the level of structures”, Raul Manarte, from the Humans Before collective, told Lusa Borders (HuBB), which is part of the project.
The objective of the project, which also includes groups of migrants and refugees and students from the Porto Higher Education School, is therefore to “increase the social visibility” of the problems among the population and the media, he added.
Each “refugee can leave their complaint, their account of what happened” and the “main objective is to compile this information and process it in an assertive way so that it can be accessible” to anyone who is interested.
The quantitative data “will be public” and the information will be anonymous, but individual reports will be made available on a case-by-case basis to the authorities or to anyone who has the right to request them.
The portal address – balcaodenuncia.pt – will be published on the social media pages of the associations that organize the project and the form will be accessible in Portuguese, English, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Urdu, Ukrainian and Nepali.
The project, the promoters maintain, “intends to overcome accessibility barriers and collect, compile and disseminate occurrences of abuse, mistreatment, neglect or general non-compliance through online reports”.
The desk wants to “compile the complaints received and transform them into public data” through social networks and collaboration with the media, to allow “civil society to have a more accurate vision of the difficulties that the migrant and refugee population experiences in Portugal”.
Furthermore, this data “could be used in civic action campaigns, pressuring structures or decision-makers to take concrete steps that allow the reduction or eradication of verified occurrences”, say the promoters.
“In parallel, an exhibition will be opened in Póvoa de Varzim, with a portrait of 12 migrants and refugees here in Portugal, who are also co-creators of this counter”, explained Raul Manarte.
The exhibition “Us and Them”, consisting of portraits of migrants and refugees in Portugal, to be opened at the Municipal Archives.
The Website, in Portuguese and English, was formed today and is at: http://balcaodenuncia.pt/
More than 51 thousand hospitalized patients in 2023 were at nutritional risk
Lisbon, May 20, 2024 (Lusa) – More than 51 thousand hospitalized patients in 2023 were at nutritional risk, that is, 28% of patients screened, and less than half (48%) were intervened in the first 24 hours after being signalled, data from the Directorate-General for Health.
The data is contained in the Annual Report of the National Program for the Promotion of Healthy Eating (PNPAS) 2023 of the DGS, released today, which monitors nutritional risk, that is, the risk of morbidity and mortality due to nutritional status, in hospitals of the National Health Service ( SNS).
Of the 181,019 hospitalized patients who underwent nutritional screening last year, 51,238 (28.3%) were at nutritional risk, says the report, adding that the average percentage of patients assessed was 31.2% in 2023, from 29.2% in 2022 and 27.4% in 2021.
According to the data, around 48% of patients at nutritional risk underwent nutritional intervention in the first 24 hours after the warning and 69.4% of adult patients at nutritional risk underwent nutritional intervention.
Commenting on these data to the Lusa agency, the director of PNPAS, Maria João Gregório, stated that the percentage of patients identified as being at nutritional risk (28.3%) is consistent with what is described in the studies.
The nutritionist explained that malnutrition is often associated with the disease.
On the other hand, he stated, “a large percentage of the hospital population is elderly and malnutrition is also more prevalent in these population groups and, therefore, these numbers are more or less in line with what is described in the literature”.