Application of fine resolution satellite data to spatial analysis and control of infectious diseases: Schistosomiasis in Kenya and Chagas disease in Argentina.

(2) URIEL KITRON, JULIE A. CLENNON, RICARDO E. GÜRTLER, CHARLES H. KING, MARÍA CARLA CECERE, GONZALO VÁZQUEZ-PROKOPEC, JANET THORNHILL, LOUISA BECK.

Remote Sensing and the Control of Infectious Diseases: Proceedings of an Interamerican Workshop.

ENSP/FIOCRUZ

Lugar: Rio de Janeiro; Año: 2005; p. 1 - 16

Role of GIS, remote sensing & spatial statistics in studies of infectious diseases Spatial analysis is an essential part of infectious disease epidemiology, and has applications for understanding transmission dynamics as well as for disease surveillance and control. For vector-borne and zoonotic diseases, landscape, climate, and other environmental factors impact the population dynamics of arthropod vectors, intermediate hosts (e.g., snails) and reservoir hosts (e.g., sylvatic mammals and birds). Consequently, evaluating the spatial component for parasitic and vector-borne diseases often entails obtaining and integrating vast amounts of environmental and field data for hosts, vectors and pathogens. Transmission dynamics and population models for infectious diseases often ignore the spatial components, so there is need for development of spatially explicit transmission models. Transmission dynamics of infectious diseases operate on multiple spatial (and temporal) scales ranging from the micro (transmission from one individual host to another, be it directly via a vector or through the external environment) through the meso-scale on a local population level to the macro (metapopulation) level. Consequently, various approaches, including landscape ecology (e.g., Cullinan & Thomas 1992, Turner & Gardner 1991, Wiens 1989) and metapopulation biology (e.g., Baguette & Schtickzelle 2003, Hanski 2004), need to be applied to studies of transmission dynamics and control program of infectious diseases (Charbonnel et al. 2002, Hess 1996, Hess et al. 2002, Holmes 2002).