ABSTRACT
The terms catastrophe and disaster are widely used in Emergency Medicine and Public Health. Nevertheless, until recently it has not been available an universally accepted definition for both phenomena. This paper examines different approaches used in the last decades to define the catastrophe and/or disaster concepts, as well as its evolution and its constituent elements. From the initial approach emerged in the 80 in the field of Social Sciences with the predominance of a natural disasters centered vision and the introduction of the dimension of the psychological impacts, to the extent of the concept in the 90s with the introduction of elements of threat, risk and vulnerability leading to the current view of the disaster an approach based on the idea of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and the International United Nations Strategy for Disaster Reduction.
Key words: Disaster, Catastrophe, Definition, Concept.