Public Health and Disasters by Emily Ying Yang Chan & Rajib Shaw

Author:Emily Ying Yang Chan & Rajib Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811509247
Publisher: Springer Singapore

11.3.1 Existing Literature

Public health emergencies and disasters are sparsely researched subject in India. The majority of publicly available reports look at individual health conditions, impacts from specific disaster events, or on evaluating existing policies. Evolution of this research is in relation to India’s evolving policy discourse on disasters which developed further with the occurrence of major disasters (see Annexure 11.2, see Table 11.8) The Odisha Super Cyclone (1999), the Gujarat earthquake (2004), and the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004) are the most researched subjects for their impact on health. Before the Super Cyclone, there are studies on impacts of vector-borne diseases such as leptospirosis (WHO 2000), cholera outbreaks (Sur et al. 2000) and a study on psychiatric disorders in survivors of the 1993 Latur earthquake that killed over 10,000 people (graded VIII on the Mercalli intensity scale) (Sharan et al. 1996).

After 2000, India’s ongoing epidemiological transition from communicable to non-communicable diseases saw studies emerge on the threat of chronic diseases, cardiovascular diseases (Shah and Mathur 2010; Rastogi et al. 2004), diabetes, cancers, hypertension (Reddy et al. 2005; Ghaffar et al. 2004; Patel et al. 2011; Misra et al. 2011), and an overview of mental health priorities, also reflecting on impacts from disasters (Khandelwal et al. 2004). A relevant study on health systems was on the epidemic preparedness in public health that looked at environmental forecasting and disease surveillance methods to promote epidemic prevention control (Myers et al. 2000). The Odisha Super Cyclone, which impacted more than 10,000 people, triggered several studies on mental health vulnerability (Kar et al. 2004) and post-traumatic stress disorder (Sharan et al. 1996; Kar et al. 2007).

Studies on outbreaks of vector and water-borne diseases saw sustained interest with a focus on single conditions that typically result from flooding such as leptospirosis (Rao et al. 2003; Vijayachari et al. 2008; Sehgal et al. 2002), diarrhea (Mondal et al. 2001), chikungunya (Mavalankar et al. 2007), and general challenges of managing infectious diseases (John et al. 2011). (Jha et al. 2016) studied evolution of disaster policies in India that brought about the massive reduction of mortality during a disaster through better early warning and evacuation systems.7 The 2001 Gujarat earthquake that killed around 18,000 and injured over 150,000 led to focused research on health sector development for disaster preparedness (Bremer 2003) and the importance of community medical response to reduce casualties (Roy et al. 2002).

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