Climate Change Related Catastrophic Rainfall Events and Non-Communicable Respiratory Disease: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events, the impacts of which disproportionately impact urban populations. Pluvial flooding and flooding related sewer backups are thought to result in an increase in potentially hazardous human-pathogen encounters. However, the extent and nature of associations between flooding events and non-communicable respiratory diseases such as chronic bronchitis, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are not well understood. This research seeks to characterize the state of research on flooding and NCRDs through a systematic review of the scientific literature. We conducted a systematic search of PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus for published scholarly research papers using the terms flooding, monsoon, and tropical storm with terms for common NCRDs such as asthma, COPD, and chronic bronchitis. Papers were included if they covered research studies on individuals with defined outcomes of flooding events. We excluded review papers, case studies, and opinion pieces. We retrieved 200 articles from PubMed, 268 from Web of Science and 203 from Scopus which comprised 345 unique papers. An initial review of abstracts yielded 38 candidate papers. A full text review of each left 16 papers which were included for the review. All papers except for one found a significant association between a severe weather event and increased risk for at least one of the NCRDs included in this research. Our findings further suggest that extreme weather events may worsen pre-existing respiratory conditions and increase the risk of development of asthma. Future work should focus on more precisely defining measure of health outcomes using validated tools to describe asthma and COPD exacerbations. Research efforts should also work to collect granular data on patients’ health status and family history and assess possible confounding and mediating factors such as neighborhood water mitigation infrastructure, housing conditions, pollen counts, and other environmental variables.

Trend in the admissions of patients with non-COVID-19 respiratory symptoms during COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on hospital finances in Surabaya, Indonesia

“…Previous literature has also discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the literature does not have estimates of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic “effect size” on clinical and financial outcomes in a structural model [ 9 , 30 , 41 , 45 , 56 , 60 , [64] , [65] , [66] , [67] , [68] , [69] , [70] , [71] , [72] , [73] , [74] , [75] , [76] , [77] , [78] , [79] , [80] , [81] , [82] ]. Previous publications have also not provided information on the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic, patient condition, cost risk, and clinical and financial outcomes, as well as the effect of the season as a confounder in two structural models, the child model and the adult model.…”

Crowd‐based spatial risk assessment of urban flooding: Results from a municipal flood hotline in Detroit,MI

“…Social and racial disparities in the quality of local water infrastructure-along with historical segregation and "redlining"-increase risk for some groups while lowering risk for others (Bodenreider et al, 2019;National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019;PR Newswire, 2021;VanDerslice, 2011). Finally, households may not be resilient to flooding: cracks in basements or uncapped sewer outlets put homes at even higher risk for groundwater infiltration or sewer backups, as was found in a previous study in Detroit (Irwin et al, 2018;Larson et al, 2021;Peirce et al, 2022). Urban areas characterized by poverty commonly have older homes and have historically lacked infrastructure to support water drainage (Green et al, 2021;Rosa & Pappalardo, 2020), and residents or landlords may lack financial resources to repair and mitigate potential problems (Larson et al, 2021).…”

Health Consequences of Natural Disasters: An Overview of Recent Literature on Floods

“…Children may also be exposed to air pollution from vehicles and factories, who live near flood areas. Children having asthma are at risk, their condition may be worsening during floods (18). Adult mothers are also especially vulnerable to the health impacts of floods.…”