Disaster Epidemiology

What is a disaster? One of the most difficult concepts in the discipline is to arrive at a definition of a disaster. Theanswertothisquestionisshapedbymanyfactors. Historically, in many areas, disasters have been viewed from a fatalistic perspective. Disasters were or are accepted as a feature of life. In the opinion of many individuals, there is little that one can do to prevent a disaster—it is an ‘act of God.’ In recent years, though, there has been a paradigm shift with the perspective in public health and other settings that disasters are something that one should prepare for to mitigate the circumstances arising from a disaster.

The frequency of an event and the level of magnitude of its impact can also influence whether an event is regarded as a disaster or not. Events with a low frequency in occurrence and a high magnitude of impact (in terms of large economic and human losses) are usually declared disasters by government authorities. Events with a high frequency of occurrence and a low magnitude of impact might be regarded as normal or routine events. The determination of what levels are high and what levels are low, though, can be subjective and may vary by culture, prior history with the event, and the ability to respond to the event. Thus, a disaster of similar characteristics might be viewed differently in different settings. Recent efforts have taken place to begin to standardize our view of disasters. The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Brussels, Belgium, and other international agencies now typically use the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs definition of disasters as a situation or event that ‘overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to a national or international level for external assistance’ (EM-DAT glossary, unpaginated).

Many different types of events can lead to situations that overwhelm local institutions and require external assistance. As one result, crude classification schemes have evolved in the discipline to classify disasters. Most commonly, disasters are classified as either natural disaster events or man-made disaster events. Natural disasters include situations brought about from extreme climatological, geological, or

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