The Icelandic ash cloud and other erupting health threats: what role for syndromic surveillance?

Abstract

While the severe impacts of the recent eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull on transportation and economy became quite obvious even in an early stage, the consequences for the public’s health remained rather cloudy throughout. Contradictory messages to the public resulted from the lack of experience and even more so from the lack of reliable and recent data to assess the situation: On April 15th, the UK Health Protection Agency announced, according to BBC News, that ‘the ash from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption did not pose a significant risk to public health because of its high altitude’, on April 16th UK health experts advised people to return indoors if they start to get respiratory symptoms after the first ash particles were falling on the ground, and later on the same day British health officials said the effects of the ash on people with existing respiratory conditions were ‘likely to be short term’.1 It does not come as a surprise that these contradictory messages cause irritations among the public. The European scope of this event posed questions that needed approaches … Correspondence: Helmut Brand, Department of International Health, FHML/CAPHRI, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 40, 6229 ER Maastricht, The Netherlands, tel: +31 43 38 84006, fax: +31 43 38 84172, e-mail: helmut.brand{at}inthealth.unimaas.nl