This Valentine’s Day, show your loved ones you care — about emergency preparedness!

When you love someone, you want to keep them safe, especially in an emergency situation such as a disaster.

Here at APHA’s Get Ready campaign, we think Valentine’s Day is a great time to think about preparing for emergencies. What’s more romantic than saying you care enough to prepare?

Tornado preparedness e-card from Get Ready.

On that note, we’ve created some free emergency preparedness-themed Valentine’s Day cards for you to send to your loved ones. With topics ranging from flu shots and hand-washing to stockpiling and pet preparedness, we’ve got something for everyone.

The cards are free, and you can email, tweet or post them to Facebook — or even print them out! Just visit our e-card page to see the options and pick your favorites.

What holiday should we celebrate next? Tell us in the comments!

Announcing the winners of our cat preparedness photo contest

When we announced APHA’s Get Ready Cat Preparedness Photo Contest in September, we hoped that people would have fun and think creatively about emergency preparedness messages. We didn’t know just how popular the contest would be!

The contest was featured on I Can Has Cheezburger? and written about on ScienceBlogs, where we were called “part of the new (and awesome) public health.” (Aww, shucks!)

Thanks to all of this attention, we received hundreds of great photos of your purr-fectly prepared kittens and cats. After lots of hard decisions — and many “awwwws” — we’ve picked our winners.

Twenty-three photos were selected for Get Ready 2013 Catastrophes Calendar. Check out the winning photos online and share them with your friends. Scroll to the bottom of the page to download and print your own copy of the calendar!

And because we thought every cat was cute, check out some of the other kitties who didn’t make it into the calendar.

If you are at APHA's 140th Annual Meeting in San Francisco Oct. 27–31, stop by the Get Ready expo booth, #2325, to pick up a free copy of the calendar.

Thanks to everyone who submitted photos to our contest!