Disaster Response Research Development in Japan

Abstract

Japan is a country of natural disasters and many lessons have been learnt in the past. The Disaster Medical Assistant Team (DMAT) system is one of those. After the 11 March 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan experienced unprecidented disturbance of people’s life including distruction of infrastructures, mass evacuation and collapse of communities. Everything went mess from immediate shortage of life supporting facilities to loss of future prospects. The importance of the unified command system is also a lesson learned from the past disasters such as the Kobe earthquake. However, there is still a gap in tools for decision makers to acquire timely information about public health status of affected areas. For example, there are no standardised tools to evaluate the consequences of long-term evacuation on emotional and physical health. The lack of such epidemiological instruments makes it difficult to perform evidence based public health. Absence of such tools may also have hampered the participation of public health specialits into disaster response teams. In Japan, the government moved to establish a public health response team, namely Disaster Health Emergency Assistance Team or DHEAT, in order to quickly provide prompt public health survices during and after the disaster. To add an environmental component to such an effort, the National Institute for Environmental Studies started a programme to implement 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. This presentation will focus on the Japanese endeavour to develop disaster epidemiology tools and its collaborative works with the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.