Epidemiological information systems

Abstract

Public Health Authorities can take advantage of GIS in order to perform studies in disease surveillance tasks, to know how diseases spread and to locate outbreaks. Facts involved in these studies come from a wide range of sources: hospital registers, clinicians, environmental organisations, etc., so it is important to collect and store all them for it being easier to access and analyse. The increasing interest in GIS in Public Health has also been reflected in the literature. In last years, a number of books have appeared devoted to GIS and Public Health affairs [4, 9, 15], statistical methods for Spatial Epidemiology [19, 23, 24], and several journals, such as Statistics in Medicine [11, 30] and Journal of Royal Statistical Society [32] have devoted special issues to related subjects. 1.2 A GIS for Spatial Epidemiology Since the range of applications of GIS in Public Health is nearly unlimited (like in many other fields), we will focus on Spatial Epidemiology, which refers to different topics about the spatial spread of diseases: disease mapping, detection of clusters of disease, ecological analysis, etiology, etc. In this paper we describe how a Geographic Information System for Spatial Epidemiology can be developed and we briefly discuss the main points to which attention should be paid. In Sect. 2 we describe the main issues concerning data. Section 3 covers statistical methodology. Section 4 comprehends how the whole GIS can be developed, integrating and analysing data. What we have developed is explained in Sect. 5. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.