Disease as Disaster

Abstract

Escalating health care costs, driven by the use of high technology to manage rather than cure chronic degenerative diseases in rapidly aging populations, are seriously straining Western economies. What are needed are strategies which seek to mitigate those high order events that ultimately cause disease. Prevention involves deliberately changing not only environments and lifestyles, but also the nature of health care and perhaps even human biology itself. It is argued that a similar shift has occurred in disaster planning, where emphasis has moved from rescuing survivors to achieving greater safety through better planning and more sophisticated infrastructural design. That is, disaster specialists try to avoid rather than respond to catastrophes. A similar approach is long overdue in health care.