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Assessing Disaster-Related Health Risk: Appraisal for Prevention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2018

Mark Keim
Mark Keim*
Affiliation:
Disaster Doc, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia USA National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Bethesda, MarylandUSA Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Disaster Medicine Fellowship, Harvard University Medical School, Boston, MassachusettsUSA Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University,Atlanta, GeorgiaUSA
*
Correspondence: Mark Keim, MD, MBA DisasterDoc LLC Atlanta, Georgia USA E-mail: mark@disasterdoc.org
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Abstract

Risk assessment is a key component of public health interventions intended to prevent or reduce adverse health effects. Health risk assessments are widely used to guide public health programming, as well as multi-sectoral studies of environmental impact and developmental decision making. Analytical risk assessment is a well-validated tool that is routinely used among certain subsets of public health, including those for chemical, radiological, and microbiological risk assessment. However, this is not the case for risk assessments involving disasters in general, or more specifically, for public health emergencies involving environmental hazards (eg, technological, hydro-meteorological, and seismic).

There remains a need for a reproducible, well-validated, disaster-related health risk assessment process that is suitable for accommodating the current gaps in certainty. This report is intended to offer a practical framework and nomenclature for assessing disaster-related health risk that is: (1) accurate; (2) based upon historical evidence; (3) quantifiable in public health terms; and (4) inclusive of uncertainty.

KeimM. Assessing Disaster-Related Health Risk: Appraisal for Prevention. Prehosp Disaster Med. 2018;33(3):317-325.

Keywords

disasterdisaster riskdisaster risk reductionpublic health risk assessmentrisk assessment
Type
Special Reports
Information
Prehospital and Disaster Medicine , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , June 2018 , pp. 317 - 325
Copyright
© World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine 2018 

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Footnotes

Conflicts of interest/funding/disclaimer: This work was sponsored by DisasterDoc, LLC (Atlanta, Georgia USA), a private consulting firm specializing in disaster research and education. The author attests that there are no conflicts of interest involved with the authorship and publication of this work. The material in this manuscript reflects solely the views of the author. It does not necessarily reflect the policies or recommendations of the National Center for Disaster Medicine (Bethesda, Maryland USA) or the Department of Defense (Washington, DC USA).

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