EDITORIAL

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.