title: Natural Disasters and Cholera Outbreaks: Current Understanding and Future Outlook.
abstract: Diarrheal diseases remain a serious global public health threat, especially for those populations lacking access to safe water and sanitation infrastructure. Although association of several diarrheal diseases, e.g., cholera, shigellosis, etc., with climatic processes has been documented, the global human population remains at heightened risk of outbreak of diseases after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, or droughts. In this review, cholera was selected as a signature diarrheal disease and the role of natural disasters in triggering and transmitting cholera was analyzed.
  
  
  
  Key observations include identification of an inherent feedback loop that includes societal structure, prevailing climatic processes, and spatio-temporal seasonal variability of natural disasters. Data obtained from satellite-based remote sensing are concluded to have application, although limited, in predicting risks of a cholera outbreak(s). We argue that with the advent of new high spectral and spatial resolution data, earth observation systems should be seamlessly integrated in a decision support mechanism to be mobilize resources when a region suffers a natural disaster. A framework is proposed that can be used to assess the impact of natural disasters with response to outbreak of cholera, providing assessment of short- and long-term influence of climatic processes on disease outbreaks.
authors.affiliation: Human Health and Hydro-environmental Sustainability Simulation Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, 26505, USA. asjutla@mail.wvu.edu.
authors.forename: Antarpreet
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jutla
authors.affiliation: Human Health and Hydro-environmental Sustainability Simulation Laboratory, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, 26505, USA.
authors.forename: Rakibul
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Khan
authors.affiliation: Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.|Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Rita
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Colwell
mesh_terms: D002771:Cholera / Q000453:epidemiology*; D004189:Disaster Planning; D004190:Disasters; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000517:prevention & control*; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology / Q000379:methods*; D012499:Sanitation; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis
keywords: Cholera; Natural disaster; Outbreaks; Precipitation; Remote sensing; Temperature