Lessons Learned from Designing an Aeronautical Reconnaissance Coverage Geographic Information System Dashboard in the Geographic Information System-Naïve Environment to Fit the Spatial Epidemiology Study.
Geography matters in everything that we do. It affects our neighborhoods, our health, and the health of our environment. Using spatial data or data with a geographic component, we create maps where the data itself has a location. It also has information about the location’s landscape. In the Russian school of geography, the science that dealt with biophysical features of the environment was called landscape science, which was an early influence on medical geography.
Jacques May, the father of American medical geography, was a French-born doctor whose experiences in Indo-china at the beginning of the 20th century informed much of his geographic understanding of the disease. To May, a disease is a “multifactorial phenomenon which occurs only if factors coincide in space and time”. To him, medical geographies encompass geographical environments and cultural landscapes because of cultural choices such as house type, diet, and clothing could buffer or expose populations to disease.
Spatial epidemiology is the science that describes and analyzes geographically indexed health data concerning demographic, environmental, behavioral, socio-economic, genetic, and
infectious risk factors. Over the ensuing decades, spatial epidemiology grew in complexity and utility. Spatial approaches have involved increasingly sophisticated mapping, modeling, and analysis techniques. However, its scope and applications were dramatically transformed in the 1990s by introducing new geographic information systems (GIS) computing technology. GIS is the tool we use to capture, store, process, analyze, and visualize spatial information. With the modernization of mapping applications, GIS expanded to health and human services.
Public Health Open J. 2022; 7(1): 1-6. doi: 10.17140/PHOJ-7-161
