Roles of the university in disaster management.

The World Health Organisation defines a disaster as any occurrence that causes damage, ecological disruption, loss of human life, deterioration of health and health services on a scale sufficient to warrant an extraordinary response from outside the affected community. (1) A disaster can be either natural (rain, flood, cyclone, storm, land slides, earthquake and volcanoes) or man-made (war, riots, accident (train, air and ship), industrial accidents, fires, bomb explosions, nuclear explosions and ecological disasters). The director-general of World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland (1999) stated that the distinction between natural disasters and human-induced emergencies is artificial. For him, the natural hazards, which give an impact on human vulnerabilities are mostly determined by human causes. (2) Disasters will always occur and no civilization in history has been immune from their effects. The risk of disasters is increasing. There are several reasons for this, apart from improved data collection, including global warming, increased technology (especially in developing countries with immature safety systems), rapid human population changes and urbanization, civil war and conflict with a potential for population displacement and the rise of terrorism. (3)