Typhoon Haiyan: Americans' Interest and Philanthropy Flagging, Pew Finds

When the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 devastated parts of Indonesia, and when a massive earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, a sizable percentage of Americans followed those natural disasters closely — and opened their wallets to relief efforts in correspondingly high numbers.

But this month’s typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines is not commanding the same levels of attention.

And one result of the less intense interest, a new Pew Research Center survey finds, is that so far Americans are giving less to Haiyan relief efforts than they did in the aftermath of earlier high-profile natural disasters.