Excess Mortality in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: A Preliminary Report
Source: Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

A significant increase in the mortality rate for the first 6 months of 2006 substantiates the deleterious effects of enduring health consequences resulting from a major disaster. This must be understood as an urgent call for further studies and subsequent interventions. The authors believe that the underlying causes of the increased mortality rates within the greater New Orleans’ population are complex, multifactorial, and persistent. This disaster severely compromised the public health infrastructure. It is suggested that a destroyed or poorly recovered public health infrastructure, which normally would be able to identify health problems and protect the health of a population, has in fact contributed to excess mortality.

Finally, the necessity to set standards that will open the lines of communication across public health agencies in the event of a disaster is clearly indicated. Interagency communication can deteriorate rapidly in the midst of a disaster; each office is often solely focused on meeting its own needs and thereby unavailable to provide information across jurisdictions. Offices were flooded, paper records had to be rerouted, and only a fraction of office staff returned to work. This confluence of events reveals the urgent need for states to adopt electronic reporting systems.

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