Essential meaning for every planning and preparedness process are anticipation and assessment.

Anticipation means that the expert and responsible people should identify the possible hazards and predict the possibility for their occurrence. For example, the presence of a river may increase the likelihood of flooding in a district for which planning should be undertaken. Another one is connected with occurrence of the highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus and increase of the likelihood for mutation and appearance of the more easily transmissible human to human strain with bigger pandemic potential.

Assessment is a crucial management task which contributes directly to effective decision-making, planning and control of the organized response. Assessment of needs and resources is required in all types of disasters, whatever the cause and whatever the speed of onset. Three general priorities are to be identified for early assessment: location of problem, magnitude of problem and immediate priorities.

Initial needs assessment is based on the risk assessment.

Risk is defined as a likelihood of hazard occurrence and the severity of harmful consequences, or expected losses (deaths, injuries, property, livelihood, economic activity disrupted or environment damaged). The severity of consequences are resulting from interactions between natural or human-induced hazards and vulnerabilities.

Risk is a function of the hazards to which a community is exposed and the vulnerabilities of that community. The risk exposure decreases proportionally to the level of the preparedness of the community at risk. It is expressed by the following notation:

Hazard probability X Vulnerability

Risk:----------------------------------------------------------

Local Capacity (Preparedness)

The leading elements of the public health preparedness as a prerequisite for decreasing of the risk and minimizing the consequences are:

•-Water and sanitation

•-Food and nutrition

•-Shelter

•-Health services (basic health care during the emergencies, immunization and public health surveillance, basic primary health care, control of communicable diseases and post emergency hospital care)

•-Coordination (command and control)