Geographical analysis helps characterising human exposure to harmful environment during and after disasters
Abstract
Japan sits on a unique geographical location that hosts numerous volcanos, invites many storms including typhoons and experiences countless earthquakes every day. It has been recognised by the Japanese themselves as 'disaster Ginza (Ginza is one of the most expensive, elegant and luxurious shopping streets in the world)'. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on 11 March 2011 is one of many, followed by another earthquake in Kumamoto, recent severe flooding and landslides and volcano eruption. Especially the tsunami in 2011 resulted in unprecedented disturbance of people's life including destruction of infrastructures, mass evacuation and collapse of communities.
In response, the Japanese government and research institutions were urged to develop a system to provide short- and long-term public health survey capabilities to be better prepared for future environmental disasters. A public health response team, the Disaster Health Emergency Assistance Team or DHEAT, was established recently in order to quickly provide prompt public health services during and after the disaster. We also started implementing epidemiological tools that can be readily used from immediately after the disaster onset to decades long recovery periods for assessing general and specific environmental exposures and their effects on affected people' health. This presentation will introduce our experiences in response to the Fukushima situation using GIS analysis to incorporate people's behaviours into exposure modelling. Geographical information was also used to characterise community nature and activities that could influence exposure and evacuees' returns to home. The recent Japanese efforts to develop disaster epidemiology tools in collaboration with the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will be presented.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.U41A..04N
- Keywords:
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- 0220 Geomedicine;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 4331 Disaster relief;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4343 Preparedness and planning;
- NATURAL HAZARDS