Global Health Impacts of Floods: Epidemiologic Evidence

作者：Mike Ahern, Sari Kovats, Paul Wilkinson, Roger Few, Franziska Matthies · 发表于：Epidemiologic Reviews · 年份：2005 · DOI：10.1093/epirev/mxi004 · 被引用次数：819 · 研究领域：Climate Change and Health Impacts、Disaster Response and Management、Flood Risk Assessment and Management

Floods are the most common natural disaster in both developed and developing countries, and they are occasionally of devastating impact, as the floods in China in 1959 and Bangladesh in 1974 and the tsunami in Southeast Asia in December 2004 show (1). Their impacts on health vary between populations for reasons relating to population vulnerability and type of flood event (2–5). Under future climate change, altered patterns of precipitation and sea level rise are expected to increase the frequency and intensity of floods in many regions of the world (6). In this paper, we review the epidemiologic evidence of flood-related health impacts. The specific objectives were as follows: ... We developed a search algorithm to identify the published literature concerning the health impacts of flood events. A search was made of the BIDS (Bath Information and Data Services, Bath, United Kingdom), CAB Abstracts (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau International, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom), PsychInfo (American Psychological Association, Washington, DC), Embase (Elsevier B. V., Amsterdam, the Netherlands), and Medline/PubMed (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland) reference databases using combinations of terms for flooding and selected health outcomes as terms in the title, keywords, or abstract (figure 1). Terms from Medical Subject Headings (MeSH; National Library of Medicine) were used where relevant. We excluded papers that addressed only population displacement, e...