Teaching about disasters in medical education: the need for international collaboration

Dear Editors, Pfenninger et al. [1] presented in a recent research paper an outline of a curriculum covering medical student disaster education. Their work demonstrated an interdisciplinary format and multi-experiential structure for a curriculum. However, understanding the rationales for including such a component in a medical curriculum might need to be clearly highlighted. Furthermore, many universities are lacking expertise in this area and find it challenging to take such decisions. These two issues were not adequately addressed by Pfenninger et al. in their paper. Disasters caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, other natural disasters or terrorist attacks put us in situations with a high level of threat to life, property and the environment. The recent earthquake in January 2010 in the Haitian region reflects the wide scale of such damages [1]. However, looking carefully beyond this catastrophe, we realize that there has been an increasing pattern of such disasters over the last 10 years (Table 1). A careful review of data reveals that disasters caused by earthquakes with such large scale have not occurred since the 1920 Haiyuan earthquake in China. Such a trend raises the need for including a training component in the undergraduate medical and other health professional curricula covering disaster management systems and public health preparedness. The aim is to enable graduates to be prepared for risk Table 1 Deaths from major earthquakes, natural disasters and terror attacks from 1999 to 2010*