Incidence and Mortality Rates of Disasters and Mass Casualty Incidents in Korea: A Population-Based Cross-Sectional Study, 2000-2009

Kim, Soo Jin; Kim, Chu Hyun; Shin, Sang Do; Lee, Seung Chul; Park, Ju Ok; Sung, Joohon

Previous research carried out in the US, Britain, and Spain dealt only with natural disasters, MCIs, and major incidents (7, 27, 28) . Spain showed a linear increase in the incidence of disasters over a 55-yr period , 82% of which were natural and 18% technical (2) . Most disasters showed a mixed pattern. For disaster types, flood was the most common (31.5%), followed by air crashes (30.2%). With regard to the effects of technical disasters, transit crashes showed the highest death rates (71.6%). For transit crashes, land-based events were the most common (43.6%), followed by air (32.1%) and sea (24.4%), results that were significantly different from those of Korea. In Britain, major incidents documented in research papers over a 28-yr period were analyzed to calculate the incidence rate; the results indicated a rate of 3 to 4 incidents per year with a total of 108 incidents (range 0-10) (2, 8) . There were 63 cases (59.2%) of public transportation crashes, 22 cases of civil disturbance (20.3%), and 16 cases of industrial incidents (14.8%). These results were similar to those for MCIs in our study. In our study, disasters and MCIs were analyzed to calculate the national and regional statistics for the incidence, crude mortality, crude injury, and characteristics of each disaster type using the NEMA database, which includes all major incidents and accidentals, to increase the credibility and sensitivity of the study and decrease the selection bias. We reconstructed our database from NEMA reports to verify the special characteristics of disasters and MCIs in Korea. Furthermore, in our study, both disasters and MCIs were analyzed to show the incidence frequency, the number of incidents for each incident type, and the number of injuries and deaths by time-series. In previous research, traffic crashes, residential fires and violence were reported as the leading causes of MCI (7) . However, the leading causes for disasters in Korea were road crashes, general floods, incidents at mass gatherings, and fires. The leading causes for MCIs were road crashes, fires, and general floods. NEMA has two separate lines of work, fire-based tasks and mitigation-based tasks, and it focuses only on prevention, rapid response and mitigation to minimize disaster damage with a minimum expenditure of resources. Thus, there is no efficient connection and cooperation with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which handles the public health sector. A disaster management plan for public health is warranted to properly analyze and present the characteristics of disasters/MCIs, thus enabling preparations for each region, mitigating damages, and monitoring trends in disasters/MCIs. NEMA and the Ministry of Health and Welfare need to establish a system for cooperation on disaster management and epidemiologic investigation of the disasters/MCIs using a predetermined standard.