Impact of Floods in China: An Update Literature Review

Background Flooding is one of the most common natural disasters in China. With climate change, the Chinese communities will further increase their vulnerabilities to extreme weather events. In order to mitigate disaster risk, a better understanding of flood disaster profile and human health impact of floods in China will provide evidence to support the development of interventions to facilitate recovery of affected population in field setting. The study objective is to summarize update knowledge of health impact of floods in China. Flood assessing methodologies and mapping techniques will also be explored and evaluated for their relative merits to examine epidemiology impact of floods in the region.

Methods A bilingual keyword literature search was performed in July- September 2011. PubMed, Medline, Google Scholar and Chinese database Wang Feng and Chinese Journal Full-Text Database were evaluated for the publication during 1979-2011. Examples of keywords used included flood, human health, GIS, disaster epidemiology. Quality, relevance and applicability of the reported literature were examined critically with the EPPHPPQ (2003) assessment tool.

Results Our results showed that high quality evidence published in existing databases were limited. Existing studies skewed towards reporting of negative flood impacts on physical and psychological health. Major knowledge gaps included the relationship among the geographic locations, the population exposure to natural disasters and related health hazards. In addition, methodology that examined how to map the disaster profile from a spatial perspective were limited.

Conclusion The information, flood monitoring and methodology for examining human health of flooding disasters are in their infancy. More flood-related study and methodologies should be developed to strengthen the epidemiology assessments and to support flood related disaster preparedness and mitigation response among Chinese communities.