Posted by Tanvir ahmed in
Natural Disasters; Today’s Concern
The world has become increasingly vulnerable to natural
unregulated in recent year. Population growth, unplanned and unregulated land
use, lack of environmental controls, and the poor application of building
standards, increased climatic variability resulting from global climate change
are the significant contributory factors that raises the probabilities of
natural disasters like earthquakes result many deaths and asset losses indeed.
Poor people in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to such
disasters because of their living. They are living in dangerous locations, such
as flood plains, river banks, steep slopes, reclaimed land and highly populated
settlements of flimsy shanty homes.
Climate change has
set in, with global temperatures projected to rise up to 4 degrees Celsius by
2100. Tropical cyclones will likely become more frequent and more intense,
rainfall will increase and sea level may rise by up to nearly a meter as
tropical sea surface temperatures increase. Climate change is also expected to
bring more natural disasters such as drought and flooding. Such changes will
inevitably affect health, increasing incidence of diarrhea and malnutrition. The
incidence of mosquito-borne diseases, in particular, is likely to change. In
some tropical regions both cyclones and floods create breeding ground for the
mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue. Poor populations in coastal areas are
particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and the associated threat of
mosquito-borne as well as other communicable diseases. In south and south-East
Asia, the last decade has brought many disasters, including devastating floods
in India, super cyclones in India, Bangladesh,
Myanmar and tsunamis
affecting India, Indonesia, Srilangka and Thailand. We
must document our experiences with natural disasters to help guide future
action. The WHO Regional Office for south-East Asia
is already analyzing the relationship between climate change and health,
preparing research protocols to assess how climate change might affect
communicable diseases like diarrhea and cholera as well as mosquito-borne
diseases, and to assess plans for preparedness.
Global models do not help regional or country level
assessments as they are too coarse. Individual countries must study data from
past disease outbreaks and assess the likely burden of climate change effects
on communicable diseases, in terms both of additional areas at risk and
population likely to be affected.
We need information to identify potential
sufferers and evaluate current states of preparedness existing health system
infrastructure, identifying the latest intervention tools available and
providing the resources to combat the health consequences of climate change.
Governments must local communities’ capacity to determine what additional
inputs are needed.
