Preliminary study of avian influenza a infection using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Abstract

The outbreak of Avian Influenza A (H5NI) infection has spread across all over the world from East-South Asia to Russia, Greece, Romania and Turkey. It will be important to find the transmission route and determine the environmental factor that affect the prevalence of avian influenza A virus. Based on the environmental parameters derived from remote sensing (RS) measurements and the avian influenza A (H5N1) infection case data in China during January 23, 2004 to February 24, 2004, the correlations between the outbreak of H5NI avian influenza and the environmental parameters of the infected area, such as land surface temperature, was conducted using the spatial analysis abilities of GIS. The statistically significant association between the land use or land cover and outbreak of avian influenza A infection was found, i.e. about 86.4% of the 44 cases are in the cropland. Besides, by the buffering analysis, it is estimated that the vicinity at 50 km or so to main railways plays a key role in the spatial distribution of avian influenza A infection. Finally, we draw preliminary conclusion that the infection often outbreak in a certain range of land surface temperature etc probably due to in part the H5N1 virus implications. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.