Application Of GIS And Remote Sensing For Study Of Epidemiology Of Infectious Diseases-Case Studies Of Hepatitis B And Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza

In terms of the evaluation of Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), about 80-90 percent of government data, which naturally include those from health department, are georeferenced. This situation makes no differences in other countries. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) have strong ability of acquirement, management, processing, analyzing and visualization of georeferenced data. So they have inherent advantages in health applications. RS is capable of obtaining spatial data rapidly and widely. With the advance in RS research, new satellites and sensors have been launched into space. Resort to various spaceborne tools, plenty of atmospheric, oceanic and terrestrial information can be acquired, which provides data support for heath research. In addition to perfect and develop traditional map based analysis, GIS also begins to improve its spatial statistic analysis ability, which is currently weak in GIS due to historical causes of GIS development. In the integration of GIS and RS, great improvements have been made. The current mainstream GIS and RS software packages are basically able to comprehensively analyze raster and vector data with most commonly used formats. Taking Hepatitis B and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) as examples, this paper researches on disease mapping, clustering analysis, ecological analysis etc. issues of epidemiological research of infectious diseases. To sum up the work of this paper, the following achievements have been gained:(1) Disease mapping of Hepatitis B with Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) techniques and Kriging methods.